Hasura Data Delivery Network and other big news at HasuraCon 2023

HasuraCon 2023 is finally here! And this morning Hasura CEO and Co-Founder Tanmai Gopal announced a ton of big news from the fourth edition of our annual user conference aimed at keeping everyone on the forefront of APIs and data access and management. And I have to say, the future has never felt so near.

These product advancements are taking leaps forward into the world of development to come. Ready to celebrate some true Hasura goodness?

If you didn’t get a chance to attend the keynote, registration is still open. So long as you register, you’ll have access to an instant replay of the keynote (and every session after they end).

And, hey… there’s still two days left to attend live sessions and take a deeper dive into each one of these new features and other amazing announcements, which are linked below for your convenience. If you haven’t registered yet, click the button below to get yourself access.

Register for HasuraCon 2023

Okay, let’s get to the main HasuraCon 2023 headlines.

The advancements we’re making with Hasura v3 (coming soon) are truly unprecedented, and there are specifically two new features we know everyone has been hoping and waiting for.

First, Hasura Data Delivery Network (DDN) is an edge network enabling developers to run low-latency/high-performance data APIs at global scale, with no additional effort or fees. This is made possible by a major architecture change of the Hasura engine, such that there is a zero cold start for the server.

As a result, the Hasura runtime can be instantiated on the edge region when the API is invoked, enabling instant auto-scaling to handle any spike in traffic – globally.

All projects deployed on Hasura Cloud will be automatically deployed to an edge network of 100+ global regions, with 99.99% uptime guarantees, delivering the best experience to the end consumer.

To further minimize network latency, between Hasura and the underlying data source, Hasura DDN integrates seamlessly with distributed databases (e.g. CockroachDB, Amazon Aurora, Yugabyte, etc.), automatically routing data queries from the user to the nearest database replica.

Hasura DDN is also a much more cost-efficient way to get value-based API pricing, instead of infrastructure-based pricing, than alternative approaches like always-on or warmed-up instances.

Then, the other thing every developer wants is to iterate at an extremely fast rate. Hasura DDN also enables instant API iteration and rapid testing, by allowing developers to iterate on their APIs – CI/CD from code to global-scale production (including building, validation, and testing) – instantly. This is true regardless of the number of data models connected, across all changes and scenarios.

Building APIs traditionally requires build/validate/test on the code. This is difficult to do at scale, and previously took anywhere from minutes to hours depending on the type of change and the complexity of the metadata. Metadata changes will now create builds that can be independently tested and applied to projects, enabling superior API version control and more seamless collaboration between developers.

Register here for early access to Hasura v3.

Watch a replay of the session Introducing Hasura version 3 with Senior Product Manager, Rahul Agarwal | June 21, 2023 @ 10:15 AM PST | for more details

Hasura Federation is one of the most efficient ways to compose multiple domain APIs into a single, unified API – aka the supergraph  – to greatly simplify real-time data access and management.

Building on these capabilities, the new Hasura Schema Registry makes managing, governing, and collaborating on a federated API even simpler.

The Hasura Schema Registry allows developers across multiple teams to easily audit and get proactively alerted on GraphQL schema changes across diverse data sources, which helps them more reliably and confidently push changes in mission-critical production apps.

Watch a replay of the session Data Federation made easy with Hasura given by Senior Product Manager, Vaishnavi GVSl | June 22, 2023 @ 9:45 AM PST | for more details

There were two major open source innovations we introduced at last year’s HasuraCon that were created to promote true community collaboration on the Hasura Platform: GraphQL Data Specification (GDS), which enables API developers to create enterprise-grade APIs, and the GraphQL Data Connector (GDC) SDK, which enables developers to author custom data agents.

We are excited to announce major updates to these foundational blocks.

Previously known as GDS, with Open Data Domain Specification (Open DDS) Hasura has implemented a domain model-driven approach to API design and development. The new Hasura metadata is modeled on the Open DDS, which means developers can now confidently author highly performant, secure, and standardized APIs in a declarative manner.

Watch a replay of the sessions Domain data and API specification with Staff Engineer, Abhinav Gupta | June 21, 2023 @ 11:30 AM PST | for more details

Native Data Connector (NDC), which was previously known as GDC, now makes it simpler for anyone to create an NDC agent for a new data source. Leverage state in NDC to build advanced features such as elastic connection pooling into their agents. This update gives creators better support for creating non-database agents, and offers new features like parametrized models and commands.

Logical Models along with Native Queries for PostgreSQL, BigQuery, and SQL Server allow developers to seamlessly incorporate the full capacity of a database's query language, such as SQL into the Hasura auto-generated API.

This offers users an enriched and extended range of query possibilities and operations, enhancing the developer experience and broadening the capabilities of the Hasura-generated API.

By enabling users to employ their database's full query language capabilities, Native Queries enhances query expressivity by bringing SQL into Hasura auto-generated API.

Native Queries does away with the need for DDL privileges to build custom mapping, making it far more accessible for users in different settings, particularly within enterprises.

Finally, there’s now support for a more comprehensive range of function return types, allowing Hasura to handle functions that don’t necessarily return a table, thus accommodating a more diverse set of databases and function types.

Watch a replay of the session Unlock the full potential of your database and turbocharge your app with Senior Product Manager, David Meleney | June 22, 2023 @ 11:30 AM PST | for more details

Today’s launch of the Hasura MongoDB connector brings the Hasura magic to a whole new data store category – NoSQL!

In minutes, users can now point Hasura to their MongoDB instances and auto-generate a fully featured GraphQL API from their collections and documents. For any developer looking to build modern GraphQL-powered apps on MongoDB, this connector compresses the backend development effort by orders of magnitude and accelerates the time to market.

Bringing API automation to NoSQL stores required rethinking how the Hasura JIT compiler automatically translates an arbitrary GraphQL query into a performant, native MongoDB query. It takes into account pushing down permission rules and projecting fields as the first cut on performance, with an eye to several other areas where it is possible to make fewer requests to optimize end-user performance.

With this connector, Hasura now supports the top five databases as ranked by DB-Engines.

Watch a replay of the session It should’ve been Mongo all along! with Director of Product Design, Martin Mark | June 21, 2023 @ 10:45 AM PST | for more details

In addition to its existing availability on AWS and GCP, we are happy to announce that Hasura Cloud is now available on Microsoft Azure, a capability that enhances and expedites API development within the Azure ecosystem.

Developers can now build low-latency high-performance and secure applications by co-hosting their APIs and databases within the same Azure regions.

Watch a replay of the session Hasura on Azure Cloud by Senior Product Manager, Amit Tomar | June 21, 2023 @ 11:45 AM PST | for more details

This HasuraCon marks major milestones in our journey, unveiling our pioneering innovations in API design and performance, rapid iteration, governance, database interactivity, and multi-cloud deployments. All of these advancements have come as a result of feedback, insights, and support from our user community.

Thank you for being a part of HasuraCon 2023, and for being a part of our community. We look forward to continued innovation and joint success going forward.

One final reminder to register for HasuraCon 2023 to catch sessions live, or if you can’t make it, get access to instant replays!