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Tag: DDN

  • Hasura Adds “Supergraph” to Platform for Managing APIs

    Hasura Adds “Supergraph” to Platform for Managing APIs

    Hasura, whose product helps compose GraphQL APIs backed by databases and services, today made available in beta an update to its platform. The company is adding a graph modeling framework that makes it simpler to manage application programming interfaces (APIs) at scale.

    The goal is to make it easier for IT teams to declaratively create APIs and then manage them at scale, said Hasura CEO Tanmai Gopal. As application environments made up of multiple backend services and databases become the enterprise norm, there is a pressing need to simplify the management of what has become thousands of APIs in an enterprise IT environment using query compilers and routing capabilities built into the platform, he added.

    In version 3.0 of the Hasura Data Delivery Network (DDN), the “supergraph” execution engine is based on a serverless runtime engine that, the company says, will replace its previous graph technologies to manage both GraphQL and REST APIs.

    In addition, all connectors provided by Hasura have been rebuilt using an open specification and are now available as open source software on the Hasura Connector Hub. Hasura is also making available a software development kit (SDK) to enable IT teams to build custom connectors.

    Written in the Rust programming language, the supergraph framework eliminates the need to create and manage GraphQL servers or services to deploy a graph. Additional data domains as a result can be added or replaced without breaking the graph used to manage other APIs.

    The update to the Hasura DDN also adds new build system to provide instant API previews and support for rollbacks, a redesigned console featuring a graphical supergraph viewer, API analytics, observability, and auto-generated API documentation capabilities. Every iteration of the Hasura supergraph is instantly available as an immutable build that can be tested in preview. Every change to the supergraph is also validated before build, letting users identify potential bugs, stylistic issues, syntax, and type errors.

    In addition, Hasusa has added a sub-millisecond cold start capability to enable rapid autoscaling and plane to shortly add caching to improve API performance in edge computing environments.

    Longer term, the company plans to add additional a range of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to enable IT teams to identify issues requiring troubleshooting earlier and generate reports, Gopal added.

    While REST APIs are still more commonly used than GraphQL, more IT teams are employing the latter. That’s because GraphQL provides more control over how data is accessed and consumed. Most organizations will soon be using a mix of REST and GrapgQL APIs, but it might be years before REST is supplanted as the dominant format simply because those APIs are more familiar to developers and easier to create.

    Regardless of the type of API used, however, their numbers continue to steadily increase with each microservice added to an IT environment. It’s not always clear which teams within an IT organization are managing those APIs but increasingly best DevOps practices are being used to deploy, manage, secure and update them alongside every other type of software artifact. The challenge, of course, is making it simple to manage those API workflows in a way that doesn’t require yet another specialist to be added to the DevOps team.

  • Hasura Unfurls Data Delivery Network Based on GraphQL

    Hasura Unfurls Data Delivery Network Based on GraphQL

    At its HasuraCon 2023 conference today, Hasura launched a Data Delivery Network (DDN) based on a set of GraphQL application programming interfaces (APIs) that makes it simpler to integrate distributed sources of data.

    In addition, Hasura is adding Hasura Schema Registry to streamline API governance using graph technology, a MongoDB connector, a Native Data Collector (NDC) for REST APIs and support for the Open Domain Data Specification (OpenDDS), an open framework for modeling APIs originally developed for the travel industry.

    Finally, Hasura is adding support for Native Queries and Logical Models capabilities that convert SQL requests into API calls.

    The Hasura DDN leverages the GraphQL API to enable sub-second integrations across a network that, in concept, is similar to how a content delivery network (CDN) is constructed.

    Hasura CEO Tanmai Gopal said the goal is to enable sub-second integration of data at a global scale across a network with more than 100 regions. Developers can integrate their APIs in less than a second regardless of the number of data models connected. Metadata changes can also be used to create builds that can be independently tested and applied to projects to enable API version control and collaboration among development teams.

    The Hasura DDN is accessed via Hasura Cloud, an instance of a data integration platform that can be deployed on multiple clouds, including Microsoft Azure, and will soon be made available for private clouds managed by internal IT teams.

    GraphQL is gaining traction as an alternative to REST APIs for integrating data, but it’s more complex to implement and manage. The Hasura DDN extends the reach of a Hasura Cloud platform that provides a simpler method for adding GraphQL capabilities to an IT environment in a way the also conserves network bandwidth, noted Gopal.

    GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling queries that provides a complete and digestible description of the data in an API. It can also be used to pull data from multiple sources because it uses a schema that defines the different types of data available. REST APIs, in contrast, can only fetch data from a single source. As such, many organizations that are trying to drive adoption of reusable digital services are relying on GraphQL.

    It’s not always clear who within an organization is assuming responsibility for managing the APIs that developers create, but as the number of APIs increases, DevOps teams, in many cases, are moving to centralize API management. In fact, the more data an organization creates, the greater the corresponding use of APIs to programmatically access that data becomes.

    Hasura is betting that as organizations reach a critical mass of API integration requirements, it will make more economic sense to rely on a purpose-built data integration platform accessed as a cloud service versus relying on a set of tools and platforms they need to configure and manage. Regardless of approach, the one thing that is certain is the number and types of APIs that need to be managed are rapidly exceeding the ability of IT teams to keep pace.