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How Has Netflix Embraced GraphQL For Rapid Application Development

Netflix uses GraphQL for its API platform to improve development time by up to 40%. GraphQL allows developers to make fewer requests and retrieve nested data in one call, improving performance. Netflix engineers found the Graphile library helped them quickly expose PostgreSQL data as GraphQL APIs. By standardizing on GraphQL and Graphile in Docker containers, Netflix can rapidly develop applications for new devices and changing business needs.

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jennifer Carnel
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77 views4 pages

How Has Netflix Embraced GraphQL For Rapid Application Development

Netflix uses GraphQL for its API platform to improve development time by up to 40%. GraphQL allows developers to make fewer requests and retrieve nested data in one call, improving performance. Netflix engineers found the Graphile library helped them quickly expose PostgreSQL data as GraphQL APIs. By standardizing on GraphQL and Graphile in Docker containers, Netflix can rapidly develop applications for new devices and changing business needs.

Uploaded by

jennifer Carnel
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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How has Netflix Embraced GraphQL for Rapid

Application Development?

Netflix is an American entertainment company founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc
Randolph. Netflix provides various productions to subscribers, like television series, documentaries,
animated movies, and stand-up comedy specials. They produce original content using several types
of media formats.

At Netflix, people always looking for ways to create the best user experience when streaming your
favorite show. The engineers at Netflix constantly try to find new technologies that will enable them to
do this more efficiently.

One of the newest frontiers in computing is GraphQL - a data querying language that has allowed
engineers at Netflix to rapidly develop their API platform and improve development time by up to 40%.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs created by Facebook in 2015. Ten years ago, the typical way
to build an API was to have a dedicated backend service that would do all of the data transformation
logic.

This is pretty similar to what some people are doing today with RESTful APIs. The benefit of GraphQL
over RESTful APIs is that it allows you to make fewer HTTP requests, which means better
performance and scalability. Netflix is a leading provider of entertainment, and they have been using
GraphQL for Rapid Application Development.

Why did Netflix introduce GraphQL for Rapid Application


Development?
First, they believed that using the GraphQL IDE in the form of GraphiQL would allow them to
associate the documentation with the schema and that this would provide developers with ergonomics
through a better understanding of the system itself.

To make it easier to implement these microservices, Netflix engineers standardized their own
Docker image based on Graphile.
Having a normalized Docker holder facilitating Graphile furnishes groups with the framework they
need to rapidly model and straightaway foster applications for new devices to meet the steadily
changing requirements of the worldwide media studio during these difficult occasions.

Implementing GraphQL can enable faster development and prototyping, and as seen in the case of
Netflix, under extreme conditions can enable fast collaboration that surpasses the flexibility of other
current solutions.

With GraphQL, you can iterate, develop, and test, and your greater understanding will lead to greater
efficiency and effectiveness of the underlying system.

Luckily, there is a great example of using GraphQL to deploy an efficient backend for rapid
deployment.

On the Netflix Technology blog, Dane Avilla, Senior Software Engineer, explains exactly how
GraphQL unleashed these benefits. The choice of GraphQL is due to its ability to define strongly
typed, scalable, and efficient APIs. To build the API in accordance with our principles, we chose
GraphQL and PostGraphile.

Since all of our GraphQL CRUD APIs are auto-generated, we need APIs to be consistent and
expressive in order to fully leverage the power of GraphQL from consumer clients.

In an early investigation of GraphQL, Netflix engineers found out with regards to the Graphile library
for uncovering PostgreSQL database objects (tables, views, and functions) as a GraphQL API.

Using Graphile, Netflix engineers can quickly expose PostgreSQL datasets as APIs. We assume a
Docker container running a very simple NodeJS web server and Graphile library (along with some
Netflix add-ons for security, logging, metrics, and monitoring) can provide a "better than REST" or
"REST+" platform. +" for rapid development work.

What makes GraphQL Unique?


The GraphQL layer has a "No Business Logic" rule that permits backend area APIs to
autonomously oversee space or stage (web or application) specific content.

This separation of back-end and front-end development cycles is extremely important, and the ability
to mix and match is what makes GraphQL so effective for rapid development.
New endpoints can be created, tried, designed, and conveyed by every customer group without
coordination (except if they rely upon new highlights of the API administration benchmark, in which
case they should delay until such changes are sent ). prior to hitting their endpoint).

Expedia moved from a particular REST administration to a central data graph utilizing GraphQL to
take care of issues utilizing REST endpoints where engineers invest more energy sorting out which
administration to call than creating functionality.

Netflix has opened up the Domain Graph Service (DGS) platform developed by Content Streaming
Services to make it easier for standalone and federated GraphQL services to implement GraphQL.
GraphQL is a query language created by Facebook to empower declarative information recovery.

The GraphQL API is characterized utilizing the Schema Definition Language (SDL), which is
basically the same as the way that protocol buffer message types are characterized. It is independent
of the programming language and has its own type of system to define the data structures that the
API will work with.

By design, it is designed to help developers build fast and flexible APIs that are easy to maintain. As a
choice to REST, it permits engineers to make inquiries that recover information from different
information sources in a solitary API call.

Netflix involves it as a query and information manipulation language to maneuver information into
frameworks that help its substance advancement group, the organization says.

Conclusion

The Netflix API is a Java application that runs on hundreds of servers and handles over 2
billion incoming requests per day for millions of customers worldwide.

Because of the nonexclusive and granular nature of the first REST-based Netflix API, each
call just returns a piece of usefulness for a given UI, requiring customer applications to settle
on numerous decisions that should be joined to make a solitary UI. The travel cost is
additionally enormously diminished as these calls can likewise be consolidated into a solitary
GraphQL inquiry.
To improve occasion information, purchasers read information from Kafka and call different
administrations (utilizing strategies including gRPC and GraphQL) to make a joined dataset,
which is then shipped off other Kafka subjects.

According to an engineering point of view, each monetary application is demonstrated and


carried out as a microservice. An ever-increasing number of organizations are utilizing
microservice design to foster versatile programming frameworks.

Now that Netflix is moving beyond the specific use case of its API platform and with the
evolution of its cloud offerings, it is enabling enterprise-wide feature use cases powered by
AWS Lambda.

Netflix embraces distributed control and encourages a microservices approach to


applications that helps you find the right balance between data abstraction and speed as
your business grows. Netflix uses Apache Kafka as the de facto standard for event
processing, messaging, and streaming.

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