Apollo Connectors for REST APIs available today to enable next-gen intelligent app development
Additional new product enhancements help enterprises improve developer efficiency and API performance
Coinbase, Indeed.com, JUCR among hundreds building their API strategies using Apollo GraphQL, also presenting this week at GraphQL Summit 2024 among many industry leaders designing, building, and operating GraphQL at scale
Apollo GraphQL, the GraphQL API Platform company, today announced Apollo Connectors for simplifying GraphQL API integration. Unveiled at GraphQL Summit 2024, this groundbreaking addition to Apollo’s product suite empowers organizations to leverage GraphQL as a complementary platform that sits atop existing services with minimal overhead, enhancing the flexibility, speed, and efficiency of API integration. By reducing the need for middleware and boilerplate code, Apollo Connectors further position Apollo at the forefront of the GraphQL API market. Apollo Connectors for REST APIs is available today in public preview.
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Many organizations recognize the potential of GraphQL but struggle with managing various APIs and maximizing the value of their existing REST API investments, which often fetch too much or too little data. These challenges add complexity and cost, slowing innovation. As API ambitions scale to develop modern and intelligent applications, the Apollo GraphOS platform offers an API platform approach that reduces the cognitive load on development teams, allowing them to focus on what matters most—delivering value.
The introduction of Apollo Connectors for REST APIs simplifies this transition further by allowing developers to integrate REST APIs into a federated GraphQL schema, incrementally or all at once, without incurring additional overhead. This pivotal advancement bridges the gap between traditional REST architectures and modern GraphQL deployments, enabling a unified, manageable, and more innovative API strategy across the organization. Apollo also celebrates the fifth anniversary of Apollo Federation, now considered the consensus standard for GraphQL in the enterprise.
“The pace of innovation, driven by AI and the demand for personalized digital experiences, means that organizations can no longer afford to delay modernizing their API strategies,” said Matt DeBergalis, CTO and co-founder of Apollo GraphQL. “Apollo Connectors for REST APIs allow teams to swiftly adapt by incrementally adopting GraphQL without overhauling existing systems. This isn’t just about simplification; it’s about staying competitive in an environment where speed and flexibility are critical. Apollo Connectors are designed to make that transition seamless and immediate.”
Key Features of Apollo Connectors for REST APIs include:
- Declarative integration:Â Engineers can use a simple syntax within their GraphQL schema to connect directly to REST API endpoints, streamlining the process of mapping types and fields to underlying services.
- Eliminating the GraphQL server:Â By eliminating the complexities of GraphQL server development and maintenance, Apollo Connectors reduces technical debt and allows teams to focus on delivering value faster.
- Seamless onboarding:Â Apollo GraphOS provides integrated tooling and a smart editor for VSCode, ensuring a smooth onboarding process for teams of all sizes.
“Apollo Connectors makes it dramatically easier for enterprises to unify their API ecosystem with a federated GraphQL architecture,” said Rob Brazier, vice president of product at Apollo GraphQL. “Almost every organization of significant scale has a large REST API footprint. Apollo Connectors for REST APIs enable our customers to leverage that API footprint, integrating with it to drive innovation without wasting time on risky migrations or waterfall architectural transformations.”
Additional New Product Features Improve Scalability, Speed, and Developer Productivity
Apollo is also unveiling several enhancements to its platform, Apollo GraphOS, and its suite of tools aimed at improving enterprise scale, developer velocity, and platform performance:
- Significant performance gains now in Apollo Router Core:Â Apollo Router Core, now with a new native query planner in public preview that delivers significant performance improvements, reduces resource usage, and cuts latency when processing and planning client requests.
As Apollo customers scale their graphs to handle more clients and increasingly complex use cases, they require a way to ensure that complex GraphQL operations do not compromise performance or lead to denial of service issues. Enterprise customers can use Apollo’s GraphOS Router, which now includes native demand control to help manage and limit operational complexity, to prevent performance slowdowns.
GraphOS Router also introduces entity caching with cache invalidation in public preview. API teams can now store key business entities, such as inventory and user records, in Redis for long-term caching, ensuring responsive and high-performing applications. They also have granular control over invalidating entries based on time to live, subgraph, type, and more. Apollo will also offer long-term support for it, ensuring that enterprises can rely on it for years to come. - Improved developer velocity and performance for API platform teams. Apollo continues to prioritize developer experience with the latest improvements in Rover, its leading command-line interface for GraphOS. The new workflow improvements in Rover integrate it more closely with GraphOS Studio and bring under-the-hood improvements that make it up to 10 times faster for developers to compose large-scale graphs.
Rover now executes commands in parallel and asynchronously, such as composition and fetching, improving speed and reliability, especially for large graphs. Native OS-level threading also makes local composition up to 10x faster.
Beyond performance improvements, Rover now supports subgraph mirroring, an automated workflow that allows developers to seamlessly fetch and test subgraph configurations on their local machines. This new enhancement eliminates the time-consuming manual setup previously required, enabling developers to quickly test new subgraphs and router configurations in a controlled environment, significantly boosting developer productivity. - Automatically enforce organization-specific standards with enhanced security and compliance. Apollo GraphOS introduces custom schema checks, a powerful new feature that addresses API platform teams’ demand for enhanced schema validation capabilities. This functionality allows organizations to integrate their own business logic, security policies, and governance rules into Apollo’s existing schema check workflow, ensuring that every schema change adheres to company-specific standards. The result is a more robust, flexible, and secure approach to maintaining schema integrity, allowing platform teams to uphold organizational standards in an automated manner while adhering to stringent organizational requirements.
“Our Apollo GraphOS platform and suite of tools give enterprises the capabilities they need to build next-generation intelligent applications,” said DeBergalis. “The enhancements we’re announcing today further our mission to make API platforms more powerful, flexible, and easier to use at any scale.”
Users can experience first-hand the ease of building an expansive GraphQL API through the power of Apollo Connectors for REST APIs. Start today for free.
Join the Conversation at GraphQL Summit 2024
Apollo GraphQL invites developers, engineers, and industry leaders to join us at the seventh annual GraphQL Summit 2024, where over 1,000 GraphQL enthusiasts have gathered in person this week in New York City and online. Sponsored by Xolv.io, Team Duality, and Moon Highway, GraphQL Summit will also be available virtually on November 7, 2024. Register now to explore the latest in GraphQL and API platform engineering and join in the conversation on LinkedIn and X by following #GraphQLSummit.
This announcement and more will be featured in the GraphQL Summit keynote delivered by DeBergalis, which can be viewed today via live-stream here beginning at 9 am EDT and covered on Apollo’s blog. For those unable to attend, GraphQL Summit Virtual will be held on Nov 7 and will feature announcements and presentations from the in-person event.
Customer Validation
“Our partnership with Apollo GraphQL has been key to supporting us to build our business at Coinbase and moving towards a fully federated GraphQL architecture. We’re breaking down our monolith into manageable subgraphs, reducing bottlenecks, and creating a more scalable system. Apollo empowers our teams to scale, innovate, and grow with confidence.” – Stephanie Saunders, Engineering Manager at Coinbase
“At Indeed, we rely on our primary graph, OneGraph, to manage traffic from our native apps, website, third-party vendors, and subsidiaries. Monitoring and controlling these interactions is essential to avoid excessive load on our supergraph and unnecessary fees from third-party APIs. With Demand Control, Apollo has provided us with a high-performance, out-of-the-box solution that safeguards our supergraph from costly operations. By estimating an operation’s complexity before execution, we now have enhanced control over traffic management and can effectively apply rate limits.” – Carlos Gomez, Software Engineer at Indeed.com
“With Apollo GraphOS and federated subscriptions, JUCR delivers seamless live updates to thousands of EV charging sessions across Europe, keeping our customers up-to-date in real-time during their charging experience.” – Max Grollman, Co-founder & CTO at JUCR.
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