Kafka, GraphQL... These are the two technology's where my first question is always this: Does the person who championed/lead this project still work here?
The answer is almost always "no, they got a new job after we launched".
Resume Architecture is a real thing. Meanwhile the people left behind have to deal with a monster...
Instead of not knowing 1 thing to launch.. let’s pick as many new to us things, that will increase the chances of success.
Personally I’d expect some kind of internal interface to abstract away and develop reusable components for such an external dependency, which readily enables having relational data stores mirroring the brokers functionality. Handy for testing and some specific local scenarios, and those database backed stores can easily pull from the main cluster(s) later to mirror data as needed.
is there some reason GraphQL gets so much hate? it always feels to me like it's mostly just a normal RPC system but with some incredibly useful features (pipelining, and super easy to not request data you don't need), with obvious perf issues in code and obvious room for perf abuse because it's easy to allow callers to do N+1 nonsense.
so I can see why it's not popular to get stuck with for public APIs unless you have infinite money, it's relatively wide open for abuse, but private seems pretty useful because you can just smack the people abusing it. or is it more due to specific frameworks being frustrating, or stuff like costly parsing and serialization and difficult validation?
which I fully understand is more work than "it's super easy just X" which it gets presented as, but that's always the cost of super flexible things. does graphql (or the ecosystem, as that's part of daily life of using it) make that substantially worse somehow? because I've dealt with people using protobuf to avoid graphql, then trying to reimplement parts of its features, and the resulting API is always an utter abomination.
And yes, you don't want to use it for public APIs. But if you have private APIs that are so complex that you need a query language, and still want use those over web services, you are very likely doing something really wrong.
"check that the user matches the data they're requesting by comparing the context and request field by hand" is ultra common - there are some real benefits to having authorization baked into the language, but it seems very rare in practice (which is part of why it's often flawed, but following the overwhelming standard is hardly graphql's mistake imo). I'd personally think capabilities are a better model for this, but that seems likely pretty easy to chain along via headers?
The problem is that GraphQL doesn't behave like all other general purpose RPC systems. As a rule, authorization does not work on the same abstraction level as GraphQL.
And that explanation you quoted is disingenuous, because GraphQL middleware and libraries don't usually export places where you can do anything by hand.
They’ll be fine if you made something that works, even if it was a bit faddish, make sure you take care of yourself along the way (they won’t)
My point stands, company loyalty tallies up to very little when you’re looking for your next job; no interviewer will care much to hear of how you stood firm, and ignored the siren song of tech and practices that were more modern than the one you were handed down (the tech and practices they’re hiring for).
The moment that reverses, I will start advising people not to skill up, as it will look bad in their resumes.