What is GraphOS?

Apollo GraphOS is a complete cloud platform for building, managing, and scaling a supergraph. GraphOS provides a set of tools and services so that product developers can focus on building better apps, faster.

What's in a supergraph?

• One or more subgraphs
• A router

Subgraph

A standalone GraphQL server with its own schema. Remember our GraphQL server from before? With a little spec-compliance magic, it becomes a subgraph!

In a federated graph, each subgraph is typically responsible for a specific business domain.

To introduce subgraphs to our supergraph, we have to tell GraphOS about them. We do this by publishing them to the schema registry.

The schema registry

Published subgraph schemas are stored in the schema registry, where we can track all additions, modifications and removals. Like a history log!

The supergraph schema

The result of composing all of the different subgraph schemas together is the supergraph schema - the complete picture of everything we can do with our app's data. GraphOS takes care of this composition for us.

Router

The router accepts incoming requests from clients – and figures out how to resolve them. The router uses the supergraph schema to validate the query. Then, the router builds a query plan to determine which subgraph to send which part of the operation to.

GraphOS takes care of hosting the router, which makes it one less thing for the development team to worry about.