We are beyond thrilled to announce that Hasura Data Delivery Network (DDN) is now in beta!

Hasura DDN brings you an incredibly powerful API platform that delivers unmatched on-demand data composability in an API, while also staying true to our mission to fundamentally transform the economics of building and scaling APIs on data.

We started with a simple vision: “If you have domains, APIs should be free,” and the Hasura DDN beta release marks a notable milestone in the pursuit of that goal.

You can read more about our motivation for building Hasura DDN in this blog from Hasura CEO and Co-Founder, Tanmai Gopal.

We would love for you to take Hasura DDN for a spin.

We hope you enjoy using it, as much as we enjoyed building it.

Note: April is Hasura DDN launch month, and this release kicks off the first of many Hasura DDN feature drops coming this month!

What’s in this first release:

• Hasura DDN for Cloud PostgreSQL, highly optimized for read only use-cases.
• New DDN Forever Free Tier for 1 supergraph developer

We will be dropping a whole bunch of features through April, including more connectors, new pricing tiers, streamlined business logic integration, and more! Watch this space, or follow us on social media (LinkedIn and Twitter) to stay updated.

Before we move on to all the powerful features that make the release, a quick note on the supergraph architecture – a core concept in Hasura DDN.

The modern-era enterprise data layer is increasingly diverse, polyglot, and complex. It's no longer just a database, but a collection of databases, services, and APIs. This complexity has slowed productivity and innovation because, unfortunately, the API strategies have not evolved to meet this complexity.

A supergraph is a powerful antidote to this data and API chaos. A supergraph is an architecture and operating model where all data – no matter the source – is connected via a semantic graph, and exposed via a single composable endpoint.

Head to supergraph.io to learn more about this architecture, see reference architectures, and how it compares to other patterns like API gateways.

Hasura DDN brings the power of the supergraph to the masses by significantly lowering the effort and skills required to build and operate this powerful architectural pattern.

Now onto what we are dropping in Hasura DDN today!

What is Hasura DDN?

Hasura DDN is the next-generation Hasura API platform. Powered by a brand new Hasura v3 engine, it delivers on many of the features the Hasura Community has requested over the years, while also elevating everything you loved about the current experience.

Hasura DDN makes supergraph a core concept in the product and delivers a world-class product for building and operating supergraph – whether you are a team of one developer or multiple domain teams.  

In this first drop today, Hasura DDN delivers on this vision – starting with PostgreSQL!

We believe domain modeling should be the foundation of a supergraph. We are introducing a first-of-its-kind supergraph modeling framework that makes it intuitive to specify how multiple domains connect to form a unified semantic graph. Hasura runtime engine uses the metadata to translate and execute an API request (more on that in the next section).

This domain-first approach has many advantages:

• Declarative: Strict and typed metadata contract provides a high correctness guarantee.
• Standardization: What you model is what you get, there’s no drift between design and reality.
• Modularity: Each team can independently work on their part of the supergraph.

This metadata-driven approach is the fastest way to onboard a new domain onto a supergraph, and it overcomes a big limitation with existing GraphQL-based supergraph tooling that requires first building GraphQL servers to enable a supergraph.

Plus, the framework is data-source agnostic, making it easy to swap out the physical data source backing a domain, without impacting the API layer. Learn more here.

In a world where data is everywhere, developers should have APIs to access just the data they want, wherever that data lives.

To enable this, APIs need to become composable. Otherwise, the burden of creating bespoke API endpoints for the various data "compositions" becomes untenable.

Hasura’s supergraph delivers unmatched on-demand composability – by simply modeling your domains. Complex compositions like cross-domain joins, nested filtering and sorting, etc. come for free. No resolvers, no hard-coded aggregation, or BFFs needed. In a nutshell, your product development lifecycle is cut short significantly. Learn more here.

Composability without performance is pointless.

Hasura DDN does multiple layers of optimization to deliver the best performance in your API – for every query. The Hasura DDN query planner uses intelligent query sequencing, batching, and distribution techniques to mitigate common performance issues (like N+1) in GraphQL. The new console also debuts a query plan explorer that shows you exactly how the query plan is executed.

The native connectors, also new in Hasura DDN, are designed to leverage the native strengths of the data source. For example, using the powerful features of PostgreSQL such as JSON aggregation functions and lateral joins to highly optimize the data fetch. The strength of the connector based model is that connector authors can design and customize the query plan based on the unique qualities of the underlying data source.

This type of native optimization is not available in any other tool. API developers need to (a) be experts in the database to know how to write the most performant query for any operation, (b) actually code that query – a non-trivial undertaking and (c)maintain and modify these queries as new client requirements come in.

Learn more here.

Developer experience and delight have always been a core design principle for Hasura. Hasura DDN delivers a superior developer experience across the full API build, test, and deploy lifecycle. This includes:

A new build and release system, with instant API previews and rollback Every iteration of the Hasura supergraph (changes to relations, permissions, data sources, etc.) is instantly available as an immutable build and testable via a preview API. Builds are instantly available no matter the size of the metadata or the committed change. This is a huge improvement over Hasura v2 where the build time was dependent on both factors.

Any build can be instantly promoted to production (or rolled back) with zero downtime.

Learn more here.

Pre-commit validation
Every change to the supergraph is validated before the build is started, helping users identify potential bugs, stylistic issues, syntax, and type errors. This ensures an error-free build and preview API. Build-time checks also ensure that changes in one part of the supergraph don't violate the expected contracts with other parts of the supergraph.

Learn more here.

Enhanced observability and API analytics
Hasura DDN brings significant improvements to the observability and API analytics features, including field- and model-level usage dashboards and deeper end-to-end query tracing for each API call. Tracing features provide a full view of how the query traverses through the supergraph, letting you easily identify bottlenecks and debug failure points.

Analytics provide insights into API consumption, providing helpful guidance when evolving the API.

Learn more here.

All these capabilities enable rapid iteration, without fear of breaking changes, and positively impact DORA metrics.

Hasura DDN unveils a brand new console with a modern look and feel. The new console debuts several new UI elements that elevate supergraph as a core product concept, and aid the discovery and onboarding onto the supergraph.

Supergraph explorer
A new supergraph explorer visually shows how everything connects and is especially helpful as the supergraph evolves with new data and relations. The console also features rich API documentation, enabling rapid onboarding of new API consumers onto the supergraph.

API Documentation:
Easily navigate the complexity and diversity of your supergraph with rich documentation available that provides ways to understand the data models, reason about them, and see their real time usage. This becomes the one place for your API collaborators and even consumers to understand the supergraph structure and apply in their applications and services.

Hasura DDN connectors are built on a new open native data connector (NDC) spec and are all open source! In previous iterations, non-PostgreSQL connectors were only available in Hasura’s paid commercial plans. In Hasura DDN, all connectors are open source!

With today’s launch, we introduced connectors for PostgreSQL, with more connectors planned for this month. The new NDC framework and SDKs allow anyone to build new connectors more easily than v2, and enable us to launch new connectors more rapidly!

See Connector Hub.

Alongside all the innovation on API authoring and consumption, Hasura DDN also launches a distributed serverless runtime infrastructure. A Hasura supergraph is instantly deployed on a multi-region edge network with edge routing to ensure reliability and low latency for a global audience. A new sub-millisecond cold start enables rapid autoscaling to deal with usage spikes.

And last, but certainly not least, Hasura DDN reveals an innovative pricing model that bills you based on the number of active models connected to your API, irrespective of how much the API is called. We believe this active model-based pricing disrupts the traditional usage-based pricing paradigm by ensuring that your costs match the value you get from your API platform.

Hasura DDN also includes a very generous forever free tier that enables indie developers, and other single API developer setups, to use the product for free forever, irrespective of the scale of their application or their API load.

You can read more about the new pricing, and the philosophy behind it here.

With the release today, we are launching the Hasura DDN free tier, with Base and Advanced tiers following shortly after.

It’s a whole new product, and there’s so much more to cover. But, like they say, seeing is believing. Go experience the magic yourself.

• Try Hasura DDN
• Dive into the docs
• Give us feedback

For a limited time, we are doing hands-on supergraph consultation sessions and jumpstarts to help businesses set up a supergraph going in just two weeks.

• Request a supergraph demo and jumpstart for your team.