I wonder if they feel like GraphQL was worth it, vs. normal API servers. Maybe they saved some dev time on the front end, but did that outweigh the dev time spent on building, optimizing, etc? Somehow I doubt it.
Graphql is super easy to understand, easy to deploy, easy to scale and easy to grow.
It’s not perfect - the lack of namespaces can be a pain, a few more standard types would be good, and mutations feel a bit under baked - but there’s much to love, and very little to dislike.
Just my experience, we can agree to disagree!
Nevertheless, there are ways to include arbitrary JSON in GraphQL responses and since the JSON really is arbitrary, you can include any JSON you want, to any arbitrary depth, and the field parameters that drive the JSON query can themselves also be arbitrarily complex.
I'd say that's also a feature of GraphQL: easy things are easy and hard things are possible. But still, if you have a use case that requires this functionality then GraphQL might not be for you, and that's OK. Nobody's forcing you to use it.
I mean, GraphQL is also poor at serving binary data. You can just use a different endpoint for it. It's not an all or nothing thing.
I strongly believe developers should spend extra labor to ensure users and runtimes don’t waste cycles. I also believe labor or toil that repeats and can be automated, should. This marries both those ideas.
Finally, while thankfully you don’t say “we take security seriously” on your home page (buzzy but in practice usually a security red flag), your docs and baked-in approach show you genuinely do.
Pinged you via the TypeForm.
But with that many servers I can't help but wonder if Rust wouldn't be a better choice. I don't think they'll even need 100 which, as OP pointed out, will drastically reduce their operational complexity.
Furthermore, the strong static typing would have avoided the megamorphic functions right from the start.
I don't know. They seem to be satisfied customers, and were simply optimizing an already working pipeline in anticipation of saving money.
As a side note, I haven't seen a single "We tried GraphQL and it failed us" story on HN. Not that they don't exist, of course. It's just that there doesn't seem to be much debate about its promise.
Why would it "fail". It is just one of many possible protocols to query data. It is like arguing about using this computer language vs that computer language. Bar difference in performance they would all work.
However number of servers required to serve this traffic has still very poor ratio. And if you read between lines – they maxed out their optimisation effort on it. They cache at multiple layers. To be more precise this statement that they haven't found any low hanging fruits for optimisation should raise some serious questions and their analysis from "first principles" should probably be more thorough.