With a supergraph, we could create a single source of truth for definitions of every entity in our data model . . . eliminating a huge amount of maintenance work associated with these disparate graphs. For us, it was worth it.
In some cases, teams are almost doubling the speed at which they are releasing features and we are not even close to finishing our modernization journey ... We're just getting faster and faster.
It’s been over a year since we’ve had any breaking changes. Prior to adopting Apollo, we had breaking changes as frequently as every month. We once took down our mobile home page for six hours.
We have our vaccine finder [where] you punch in your location and select your store. Beforehand, you would select a location, and you wouldn’t know if a COVID-19 vaccine was available at a given store. You’d have to start over. Because we’re using GraphQL, we were able to drive new fields … with REST, way too much data [would’ve been surfaced] to the client.
Centralized monolithic api services are difficult to scale now that we have 1000+ engineers in many time zones. Federation makes it easier to run an automated, centralized API service, which is fantastic. But it really works well with Apollo’s schema management tools because that’s what makes the automation actually possible
Really, it’s speed and agility that’s going to take you to the next level, rather than the technology itself. That’s why I get so excited about the supergraph.
Had contracts not existed, Wayfair would’ve invested 100s of person hours building out custom infrastructure to replicate what we get “built-in,” freeing up time to focus on Wayfair customer needs and developer experience.
We have developed a very close working relationship with Apollo, which is critical to ensuring that we can help our customers through both good times and difficult times.
We introduced a new subgraph in the federated graph [for backend compliance logic when Zillow was becoming a brokerage], and it was a complete success … 70 systems migrated without any advance, and we had the deadline, right on the dot.
The graph unblocked a whole host of things that client developers wanted to do. It's definitely been a win because native app teams have been able to develop features without needing API changes.
How fast can you onboard [a new] employee and make them productive? Effectively GraphQL takes [away] that burden of talking to the right people, finding the right endpoints…That’s absolutely critical. How are you going to build innovative products if your engineers spend most of their time trying to find where the data is coming from?