August 2024 Summaries

The introduction of Python functions on Hasura's Data Delivery Network (DDN) simplifies backend development by allowing developers to write custom queries and mutations. This feature enables the integration of custom business logic, data transformations, and external APIs into Hasura DDN. It also supports the use of popular Python libraries such as pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib, and requests for enhanced functionality. Additionally, it offers built-in support for seamless integration with OpenTelemetry for improved observability and error handling. This powerful addition to the Hasura toolbox streamlines development processes, reduces operational complexity, and enhances data architecture and access.

A supergraph is an architecture that combines an operating model and an architectural pattern, facilitating designing, building, maintaining, and operating a collection of data domains as a unified graph of composable entities and operations. It leverages GraphQL to provide a platform-agnostic data definition layer, allowing for clear business value and reducing complexity in data governance. By automating GraphQL development and operation, organizations can achieve a composable data layer, simplify data access, and establish self-correcting processes. The supergraph paradigm aligns with the real world, addressing the challenges of managing ever-changing legal and regulatory requirements and the organization's evolving data environment.

hasura ddn is now in general availability, marking a major milestone in its development. This new version of hasura builds upon the existing product capabilities that were driving successful adoption and business value for users. The underlying compiler and runtime have been enhanced with significant engineering improvements. The biggest evolution in hasura ddn is to surface the core product capability that was latent in previous versions, providing a metadata-driven data access layer. This layer enables developers to create their apis directly via metadata instead of creating metadata after building their apis. Hasura's tooling helps speed up the creation of metadata and hence the final api, resulting in massive time savings for developers. The new version also guarantees that metadata is always maintained and updated, making it easier for teams to govern how their data is used and make sound decisions about investing in their data products. With hasura ddn, businesses can accelerate their transition to becoming data companies with business services attached, as the industry starts to roll out and embrace ai. The product helps developers shift their focus from a lower-level abstraction of working at an api-endpoint level to working at a higher level of abstraction of metadata, giving them time to improve their data and business logic.

The supergraph architecture framework is designed to address the complexities of building and consuming APIs in enterprise data landscapes, where multiple teams manage different domains and numerous applications can lead to challenges due to constrained resources and conflicting goals. The framework proposes strategies for constructing domain APIs (subgraphs) and data access API platforms (supergraphs), which act as an API marketplace, facilitating team collaboration, onboarding API producers, and providing high-quality supergraph APIs for consumers. The architecture lays the foundation for an operating model and system design that enable federated domain ownership, making it easier to tackle challenges with federated data access and API orchestration and composition. API orchestration involves managing multiple API calls and sequencing requests to perform complex tasks or workflows, while API composition refers to combining multiple API responses into a single unified response with hierarchical information from the different calls. The supergraph architecture advocates for awareness of the underlying sources and standardization across heterogeneous sources, providing a self-service model for API composition without requiring custom development.

Hasura Data Delivery Network (DDN) is a GraphQL-powered platform that allows users to autogenerate performant and composable APIs for data stored in MongoDB on its native data delivery network. The platform abstracts away the complexity of MongoDB's schema-less model, providing an intuitive and declarative domain-first modeling framework. With Hasura DDN, developers can quickly set up their data models, permissions, and relationships, and automatically generate standardized API endpoints. The platform offers advanced features such as cross-domain joins, nested filtering, and sorting, making it easier for developers to build faster and more efficient APIs. Additionally, Hasura DDN provides robust security, versioning, and custom business logic capabilities, allowing organizations to maintain control over their data and evolve their APIs seamlessly.

The supergraph architecture framework aims to address the complexities of building or consuming APIs in enterprise data/API landscapes. It enables collaboration among multiple stakeholders, including domain teams and consumer teams, by providing a standardized high-quality domain API that supports filtering, sorting, pagination, aggregation, etc. The framework also allows for business logic to be used in conjunction with domain models and repurposed to any output protocol. Hasura Data Delivery Network (DDN) implements the supergraph architecture and its features enable an operating model for federated ownership of domains in an API platform. It provides a common semantic layer and registry for the underlying domains and their APIs, making them interoperable. The framework solves challenges with API integration and aggregation by providing a self-serve API aggregation end state, allowing domain data to be onboarded into the supergraph automatically. This enables automation of API aggregation without requiring expensive collaboration.