Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Four Major Trends in GraphQL for 2021
By Michael Compton, GraphQL Lead at Dgraph Labs
Since GraphQL’s release as open source by Facebook, the community has grown rapidly. More and more businesses, including Global 2000 enterprises and tech giants, are adopting the technology. Dgraph Labs recently released its Slash Enterprise edition of GraphQL making it easier than ever for organizations of all sizes to adopt GraphQL in production at scale.
I see four major developments in the GraphQL community in 2021 that will take the technology to an inflection point where we will see massive adoption, even in legacy enterprises.
1. Monitoring. Anyone running workloads in enterprise production needs granular monitoring at scale. Established tools like Logrocket and DataDog are already integrating with GraphQL. Enterprises currently have monitoring infrastructure in place. Now, when developers who drive early adoption of GraphQL say they’re going to deploy this new technology, the DevOps team has tools that integrate with GraphQL. Few enterprises want to deploy another service. Instead, they want to make sure something integrates into their existing environment.
2. Hosted service providers. Look for more market entrants to offer API services on top of GraphQL. Recent examples include AWS AppSync, Code.Store, Slash GraphQL, Tyk and more. These companies offer services to help developers build their GraphQL API. They’re like deployment systems aimed at GraphQL. They come with GitHub integrations and other features that help organizations deploy and manage their GraphQL APIs from code through to production deployment. Some function much like API management tools.
3. CMS. Headless CMS is basically a tool that helps people build websites and applications. Every CMS has some way of modeling data and then tools that help you build and manage a website on top of that data. Every major company and emerging startup in CMS is adding GraphQL support. Traditionally they would have been a REST API. GraphQL greatly simplifies this. Instead of writing a lot of code to access RESTful APIs, developers just write a GraphQL query.
4. Database support. At Dgraph Labs, we’re strong proponents of running GraphQL on a native graph database for performance, scale, and ease of use. There is an explosion of tools that now have some sort of GraphQL support. Our Slash Enterprise Edition, for example. There’s also MongoDB Realm, and more to come.
By releasing GraphQL as open source in 2015, Facebook made a very smart move. It lit a fire under this promising new technology that is spreading everywhere. Much like Kubernetes and Docker containers (both open source) fundamentally changed back end software infrastructure, GraphQL will continue to accelerate productivity for developers on the front end.
Dgraph Labs was the first to adopt GraphQL as the query language on our native graph database (written from scratch in Go by Manish Jain, one of the major driving forces behind graph technologies at Google). Plus, there are a lot of good consulting agencies like The Guild who have contributed important tooling.
Sophisticated users can access a lot of great technology that is free and open source for implementing GraphQL. Production enterprise users will almost always prefer a commercial provider to support the code, of course. But the GraphQL community is vibrant and growing and there are a lot of unsung heroes contributing important advances to open source.
GraphQL and security continue to be an interesting issue, often with bespoke security layers in GraphQL. But with the exploding popularity of GraphQL, I’m sure we can expect to see security innovations as well as my predictions to make this promising technology even more popular with developers and enterprises before 2021 closes out next year!
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About the Author
Michael is the GraphQL Lead at Dgraph Labs. He has been building apps with graph databases for 15 years. Graphs give you better ways to think about your apps, and Dgraph gives you that at scale. Michael can also be found playing cricket with his family and running.
