How Nutrien Accelerated the Development of Their Digital Hub Platform with Hasura

As a merger of several companies and a network of over 2,000 retail locations across multiple business functions and partners, Nutrien had data in numerous back-end sources, which became complex to manage. They needed a way to unify all that data into a single layer for clients to consume.

Inconsistent REST APIs across Nutrien's existing applications were a common support issue. Every time a new application was onboarded, they had to set up or modify REST API endpoints, which led to many inconsistencies in the API. Additionally, REST APIs created by different teams used inconsistent approaches despite Nutrien’s efforts to discourage them. Ultimately, they needed a unified and consistent API solution that would be easy to consume and flexible enough to onboard different client applications without causing downtime.

Nutrien observed that their development teams spent considerable effort building duplicative data-fetching code and aggregation layers to support their product needs, which put a strain on their product delivery time. They needed a solution to abstract the redundant API creation process and allow developers to build faster.

With their current technological stack, the Nutrien team saw low developer productivity. It became complex for their development teams to handle the increased operational and support burden of maintaining multiple REST APIs. Developers were also unexcited by the outdated integration systems they were currently using. Ultimately, Nutrien needed to eliminate the complexity and maintenance required to maintain multiple API responses across different clients and expose developers to new technology, allowing them to be productive.

Hasura's easy-to-use interface and clean documentation made it easy for them to set up and connect their Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database. The seamless onboarding process also reduced their initial setup time and cost.

Nutrien utilized Hasura’s instant GraphQL APIs on all its data sources. By creating a table on their database, they had instant GraphQL APIs with features such as aggregates and permissions. In addition, Hasura took care of Nutriens' API data layer, freeing their developers to focus on architecture and custom business logic, which saved them development and maintenance time.

Hasura's support for remote schemas enabled Nutrien to integrate previously separated and siloed back-end systems. They could merge data, models, and schema across their different business functions into a unified data access layer for clients to consume.

Hasura's role-based access control (RBAC) capabilities with multi-tenancy support (which enabled security across shared infrastructure) ensured that sensitive data was only available to the right people. It also saved them significant development time if they had to implement the feature themselves.

Hasura Actions provided a quick and easy way to connect existing REST APIs to their unified Graph API. They could write custom business logic, wrap them around REST APIs, and easily integrate them with the unified GraphQL API. Hasura Actions allowed them to abstract the cumbersome and inconsistent REST API layer and provide a single federated GraphQL API for clients to consume.

Nutrien was able to unify its data access layer using Hasura. In addition, by utilizing Hasura-powered GraphQL APIs, they improved the cohesion of their back-end services, abstracting away multiple back-end systems from their client applications.

Utilizing Hasura Cloud, Nutrien provided a simplified GraphQL API for all their clients. As a result, they could move away from inconsistent REST APIs, and all clients could connect to a single unified API. Consumers of their APIs could explore the graph and build new features more quickly. Hasura's GraphQL APIs also offered Nutrien an API standardization level they hadn't been able to embrace in the past.

With Hasura Cloud, Nutrien accelerated its development time from months to days. Hasura-powered GraphQL APIs allowed their teams to iterate on features faster and more independently while improving cross-team communication and collaboration.

Nutrien saw a boost in developer productivity using Hasura Cloud in their tech stack. Developers no longer have to build repetitive CRUD APIs and are excited about upskilling and focusing on new technologies. Hasura Cloud also provided simplified deployment pipelines, and Nutrien developers experienced minimum maintenance and DevOps efforts using Hasura.

At an organizational level, GraphQL and Hasura specifically propelled Nutrien to come to a mutual understanding of the data types, models, and terminology used across their different services. Because of this, they could have more streamlined conversations about data problems and solutions.