Apollo GraphQL has made generally available a set of connectors for REST application programming interfaces (APIs) that make it possible to use its GraphQL-based platform to declaratively integrate workflows and processes.
In addition, the company has also added a query planner to Router 2.0, the runtime plane for its GraphOS platform. to provide IT teams with more granular control over how queries are optimally executed across a distributed computing environment.
Apollo GraphQL CTO Matt DeBergalis said the overall goal is to make it simpler for organizations to declaratively orchestrate query requests made to REST and GraphQL APIs without requiring application developers to rewrite the same boilerplate code multiple times over.
There is almost no modern business process that doesn’t to varying degrees rely on APIs. In fact, with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) agents the number of APIs that organizations will need to manage is about to exponentially increase, noted DeBergalis.
The Apollo GraphQL platform in addition to making it simpler to invoke those APIs also improves overall performance by, for example, caching API code and reducing the overall number of network hops that might need to be made, he added. The query planner can by reducing latency boost median performance by a factor of ten, the company claimed.
It’s not clear at what rate organizations are now employing GraphQL to launch queries against APIs, there is a clear need to optimize queries across legacy platforms and emerging platforms in a way that makes organizations more agile. DevOps and platform engineering teams that enable organizations to adroitly launch queries via APIs will be able to derive significantly more value from data that today is strewn across a wide range of applications and repositories.
GraphQL, an API framework for accessing multiple data sources, was originally developed to provide an alternative to REST APIs. However, given the prevalence of REST APIs it became clear organizations were not going to replace them any time soon. Apollo GraphQL is now via a set of connectors extending its ability to route queries to now include both REST and GraphQL APIs. That’s critical because most application developers continue to create REST APIs largely because they are simpler to construct.
Ultimately, each organization will need to determine when best to use REST or GraphQL APIs. In general, more complex queries involving multiple data sources lend themselves better to GraphQL but the level of expertise required to build these APIs is higher.
Regardless of approach, most DevOps teams are managing IT environments that expose a wide range of classes of APIs. The challenge isn’t so much building APIs so much as it is managing, updating and securing them. It’s not uncommon for DevOps teams to discover rogue APIs that were created by an application developer that no one previously knew existed. More troubling still, there are also zombie APIs that after initially being deployed are no longer being used but might still be accessible. In fact, while the importance of APIs is generally underappreciated, the need to proactively manage them has never been more critical.
