GraphQL was announced and initially open-sourced in 2015, with relatively little fanfare, but by 2017 it had taken off, growing from a niche technology to something being used in production by thousands of serious companies. Established teams made big bets on GraphQL, including Walmart, IBM, the New York Times, and KLM/Air France, which gave confidence to developers worldwide to switch to GraphQL for their APIs. This year saw major advancements in GraphQL, with the addition of subscriptions, the release of Apollo Client 1.0 and 2.0, Relay Modern, and other significant open source releases. The first GraphQL conference in Europe, GraphQL Europe, was held in May, and Graphcool officially launched its platform in May, making it easier for developers to get a GraphQL backend up and running. The second edition of GraphQL Summit was held in October, with over 30 talks about the hottest topics in GraphQL, and Apollo Engine was launched as a "GraphQL Gateway" component that can be used to simplify GraphQL server code. AWS AppSync was announced in November, validating GraphQL as a mainstream technology. With these developments, 2017 marked a huge leap forward for GraphQL, and 2018 is expected to be just like that again.