Thanks to our investments in Apollo tools and libraries, we’ve had the fortune to work with many product engineering teams putting GraphQL into production. As they move from a few first experiments to serious rollout, they’ve started to ask important questions. What’s the best, right way to use GraphQL and Apollo? How does it fit with the rest of my infrastructure? Who owns this new data layer, and how do we integrate it into our development workflow?
With those questions in mind, we recently held our first event specifically designed for teams running Apollo in production or well on their way there. We wanted to help teams learn about the best patterns and practices that the ecosystem has converged on, show off some of the tools and we’re building that support these patterns, and — most importantly — connect over 150 attendees with engineers at companies like Airbnb and Brigade that have made big and successful commitments to Apollo and GraphQL. Our goal was to give everyone who came the confidence to commit to GraphQL and go faster and further with it.
The three must-watch talks for teams heading to production
One big theme of the day was how the ecosystem is converging on a set of tools and patterns. My opening keynote covered some of those and showed off some of what we’re working on, like schema validation with a GitHub integration and our new Apollo Server 2.0 release with integrated APIs for GraphQL metrics collection, CDN integration, and partial query caching.
James Baxley from Apollo gave an important talk showing the incredible value Apollo brings to React development — not just easier data loading with less code, but elegant patterns for SSR, unified state management, and built-in ways to take advantage of cutting-edge ideas like React Suspense.
Adam Neary from Airbnb walked through their sophisticated strategy for adopting Apollo and GraphQL across a complex and rapidly moving product organization, with particular emphasis on how they’ve designed for the needs and interests of their infrastructure team along the way.
Tell us what you’re building
We’ve got lots of great resources for teams going into production, including example apps and implementation guides covering topics like security and schema design. On top of that, we offer a range of professional services including GraphQL and React training customized for your team’s needs, architecture and schema design reviews, production readiness checks, and developer support for the full Apollo stack. Let us know what you are building and we’ll get you all the help you need.
I hope you’ll also join us at the 3rd annual GraphQL Summit on Nov 7–8 in San Francisco. With over 800 attendees expected, it’s the largest GraphQL developer event in the world. Super early bird tickets are selling fast, so register today to reserve your spot!
