Bringing GraphQL to the edge

GraphQL has changed the way that we write web applications, by allowing frontend developers to easily build data-driven applications without needing to manage APIs or rely on backend developers. That being said, your GraphQL APIs still live somewhere — today, likely a centrally located “origin” on a cloud provider, such as AWS or Azure.

Instead of serving GraphQL requests from a centrally located origin, sitting in a remote location away from the user, what if we could bring our GraphQL server closer to the user? Using Cloudflare Workers, we can deploy our GraphQL server to each of Cloudflare's edge servers around the world, milliseconds from the users. When a user of our application makes a GraphQL request, our edge servers will respond in lightning-fast fashion.

In this talk, I'll cover why edge computing is so exciting, and how using Hasura, GraphQL, and Cloudflare Workers can make a massive impact on your application's scalability, cost, and performance. I'll also show an example open-source project that I've created that shows Cloudflare Workers acting as a caching/performance proxy for a Hasura GraphQL engine.