March 2025 Summaries

WunderGraph raised a $7.5M Series A led by Karma Ventures, with eBay Ventures joining as a key strategic investor alongside Aspenwood Ventures and angel investors. The company was already profitable in 2024 and had a burn multiple of 0.14, indicating high efficiency in revenue generation. WunderGraph's journey began with building an Open-Source GraphQL Federation Platform after realizing the need for a pivot from their initial "Backend For Frontend" Framework. The company met its first customer during the GraphQL Conf in San Francisco and then secured a deal with eBay, which became a strategic partner and investor. With this partnership, WunderGraph aims to build the Enterprise standard for GraphQL Federation. The team credits Tailor Inc. and Soundtrack Your Brand for their support and contributions to Cosmo's development. WunderGraph is now expanding its team in sales, marketing, and engineering to scale its go-to-market efforts and develop new products, including a better version of GraphQL Federation.

AI-assisted coding tools, such as Cursor, can help developers code faster by offloading repetitive tasks and allowing for more efficient use of their time. These tools also enable developers to push the boundaries of what's possible by conversationally teaming up with an AI agent. However, using AI tools during a hiring process can be seen as cheating if not used correctly. The key to vetting developers is understanding how they think and approach problems, which AI-assisted coding can help highlight. Employers should focus on assessing the candidate's rationale or concepts behind their approach rather than just the code itself. Using AI tools during an interview can lead to candidates being caught trying to cheat, as it can be difficult to conceal the use of such tools. In contrast, using AI tools in a hiring assignment can be seen as acceptable and even welcome, as it helps distinguish between those who truly know how to code and those who are just pretending. Ultimately, AI-assisted coding is not about cheating but about making developers more productive and efficient.

Today marks the end of a week-long sprint in Bretten, which has been an excellent experience for everyone involved, including new and long-standing team members. The team settled into a comfortable rhythm, enjoying meals together at local restaurants and trying traditional dishes like Maultaschen, which holds cultural significance due to its Protected Geographical Indication status. Despite being a remote company, working in person offers unique benefits, such as the opportunity to observe engineers brainstorming and building in real-time, and to connect with teammates on a deeper level. The experience highlights the importance of in-person collaboration and the value of retreats like this one, which help reconnect people and foster appreciation for teamwork. As the team heads back to their respective corners of the world, they carry away invaluable experiences and look forward to the next reunion.

The `@inaccessible` directive is a powerful tool for managing access to sensitive data in federated GraphQL APIs. It allows developers to create internal keys that are not exposed to the public, enabling the implementation of Zero Trust Data Access patterns. These patterns provide an additional layer of security by ensuring that even internal services must prove their authorization to access sensitive data. The `@inaccessible` directive can be used to hide implementation details from the public and differentiate identifiers for the same entity across different databases. It can also be used to migrate legacy systems within a federated GraphQL API by adding new identifiers without exposing them to the public. By using these patterns, developers can create cleaner abstractions, enable smooth migrations, and build more secure systems.

Today marks the start of a working retreat in Bretten, Germany, where most of WunderGraph's remote team members have gathered. The company prioritizes building strong connections among its team members and has organized this retreat to facilitate face-to-face interactions. With team members from various countries and time zones, the retreat provides an opportunity for real-time discussions and alignment on the bigger picture, which is often challenging in virtual meetings. This event bridges the gap between technical and non-technical roles, fostering a stronger sense of shared ownership over the product. The goal of the retreat is to ensure developers can focus on delivering a great user experience by refining their approach and aligning with the company's objectives.

The State of Federation 2024 report highlights the growing adoption and evolution of GraphQL Federation across various industries. With over 1.5 million WunderGraph Cosmo downloads, federation has become a proven strategy for teams to manage fragmented APIs, improve feature delivery, modernize legacy systems, and enhance customer experiences. Companies such as K Health, On The Beach, and SoundCloud are leveraging federation to tackle challenges like slow feature delivery, cross-team dependencies, and legacy system modernization. Emerging AI workloads and next-gen applications require real-time, unified data access, which federation enables. The report also showcases real-world customer experiences with federation, including improved query efficiency, security, and compliance. Looking ahead, the authors aim to make this an annual tradition, expanding their insights by surveying the broader GraphQL community.

K Health adopted GraphQL Federation with Cosmo to scale securely while maintaining API stability. They used schema checks to catch breaking changes early and hosted the router internally to ensure security and control. This has led to improved query resolution, reduced unnecessary round trips, and enhanced collaboration across teams. With Cosmo's schema checks, K Health can now identify issues such as null pointer exceptions, missing fields, and corrupted data more efficiently, reducing runtime errors. The company also benefits from enhanced security through Config Validation and Signing, which ensures only validated configurations are applied. Additionally, the unified API surface has improved communication among teams, and tracking upgrades and breaking changes is easier due to the pipeline failures that occur immediately when an update breaks something. K Health continues to expand its infrastructure with GraphQL Federation as a crucial component of their architecture, and they're now hiring for Golang developers, DevOps engineers, and solution architects who want to help shape the future of microservices, distributed systems, and APIs.

SoundCloud successfully migrated to WunderGraph Cosmo, reducing infrastructure costs by an impressive 86% and improving query latency by 45%. This was achieved through the adoption of an open-source GraphQL Federation model, which provided cost-effective scalability without restrictive licensing. By migrating away from a third-party solution, SoundCloud gained full control over its GraphQL infrastructure, enabling them to optimize performance, reduce overhead, and improve efficiency. The company's journey highlights the benefits of choosing the right GraphQL strategy, including flexibility, cost savings, and improved performance. With ongoing optimization efforts, SoundCloud is poised to further reduce spending without compromising performance, making it an attractive example for companies looking to optimize their API and microservices infrastructure.