The New Data Fabric - Enterprise GraphQL
Our #GraphQLJanuary continues with blog posts, live streams, Discord Q&A, office hours, and more. For a schedule of upcoming events, join the community or register at https://hasura.io/graphql/graphql-january/.
While discussing the #GraphQLJanuary that is ongoing with a friend, we began discussing how (in 2020) the shifting world situation had changed the way that people do business. I found myself saying: “Companies that had developers on staff (internal) were able to deliver new workflows in reaction on the challenges” and...in a moment...I knew that I had heard that assertion somewhere before.
In October of last year, Hasura held a conference entitled ‘Enterprise GraphQL Conference’ and one of the sessions was
The New Data Fabric, 2020 as a trigger for innovation
The industry is quickly moving to a model of higher level of services and abstraction, in all layers of the stack, from compute to storage to networking and application deployment and delivery. While we've seen a ton of innovation in data and data management, we're now seeing an acceleration in that space, with developer experience as a key driver for the new platforms and capabilities. Programming languages are becoming more data friendly, and data services are increasingly being defined by new APIs, notably GraphQL. The pendulum is swinging from 3 tier application models to 2 tier, with rich interactive front ends orchestrating from a palette of back end services - client/serverless is a thing. In this talk James will discuss how enterprises can build more powerful data driven apps using new technologies and methods, putting all of this change into context.
In this talk, James Governor of Redmonk discussed how the industry is changing and my ‘insight’ from above was a poor summation of an early point in his talk.
Why do I bring this talk up now?
I find that, often, we become so consumed with the ‘how’ of a technical topic that we forget about the ‘what’ of a technical topic. As I relistened to James session, I was reminded of some of the fundamental shifts that are ongoing (of which things like GraphQL are a part). And framing the education we are doing throughout the month in context of this greater trend was deeply meaningful.
To share a quote from the talk:
“We need to have a platform team creating rich services, curating those service that are then consumed by developers. <snip>
And, for me, that’s one of the reasons why GraphQL is so interesting because it begins to create a separation of concerns. Who are building the APIs and who are consuming the APIs are a different set of folks.”
This is the introduction to a section that discusses GraphQL in context of performance, predictability, portability, control, and maintainability.
Whether, over the next 3 weeks, you join our Discord Q&A, one of the many livestreams, read a blog, fire up a cloud instance, participate in office hours, etc. I encourage you to do so with the context shared above in mind. It is not just about ‘How do I GraphQL?’ but also about ‘What are we achieving with GraphQL?’
The talk is available to view, in its entirety, at the Enterprise GraphQL talks page. What is shared above is only a summary of a small section. The discussion of the Data Fabric, more broadly, is one in which not every developer is expected to do everything but the ‘separation of concerns’ allows for richer experiences and expedited innovation.
