Posted by Bengaluru, India – San Francisco, US: Hasura, a GraphQL-as-a-Service company has launched its open source GraphQL Engine. This is currently the only product available that can instantly add GraphQL-as-a-Service onto existing Postgres-based applications — without the time-consuming task of writing backend code that processes GraphQL.
The Hasura GraphQL Engine will appeal to companies that use Postgres databases who are looking to speed up their feature development velocity. GraphQL propels teams into the fast lane for lightning-fast development cycles, shrinking the application development time significantly. Hasura provides an easy way for companies to incrementally move to GraphQL and realize its benefit for application developers, without affecting existing applications, databases or users.
The Rapid Adoption of GraphQL in the Enterprise
Since Facebook announced GraphQL 3 years ago, GraphQL adoption has grown exponentially, perhaps best illustrated by this npm trends chart.
Fortune 500 enterprises such as Intuit, Walmart, the New York Times and NBC and global startups, such as Airbnb, Docker, Github, Twitter, Pinterest, Uber and Yelp are among those who have adopted GraphQL to shrink product development cycles. In India, early adopters include Myntra and InMobi.
GraphQL and the tooling around it enable GraphQL servers to act like self-documenting APIs that enable full API discoverability for the developers. As a result, once a GraphQL server is setup, front-end developers can make API requests, in order to introduce new features or change existing ones, in GraphQL without having to wait for back-end developer teams to deliver APIs and document the changes. Thus, GraphQL can dramatically increase the feature velocity for developer teams by reducing the intra and inter team communication required while developing new features.
Architected for extremely high performance, Hasura’s GraphQL Engine offers unparalleled speed and features. Adding GraphQL to existing applications still involves significant implementation; however, Hasura automates and handles this heavy-lifting out-of-the-box. Following are some of the Hasura’s distinct capabilities:
– Instant GraphQL APIs on existing databases: The Hasura GraphQL Engine allows one to start querying an existing Postgres database instantly with GraphQL. This gives companies already using Postgres an easy, incremental way to start moving over to GraphQL.
– Extremely high performance dollar-for-dollar: Hasura is an extremely lightweight engine that consumes only 50MB of RAM even while serving more than ~1000 requests/per second, delivering matchless ROI.
– Built-in authorization and authentication: Hasura’s GraphQL Engine comes with a granular, dynamic access control system that integrates with existing authentication systems such as Auth0 or custom implementations. This further aids in the incremental journey toward adding GraphQL to a company’s existing applications.
“We’re thrilled to open source Hasura’s GraphQL Engine to further ease the adoption of GraphQL. Dollar-for-dollar no other solution comes close to matching Hasura’s phenomenally high performance. The GraphQL community can harness our lightweight GraphQL-as-a-Service engine and turbocharge any of their new or existing Postgres applications. Concurrently, for enterprises using Postgres, they can make a smooth, rapid transition over to GraphQL,” said Tanmai Gopal, Co-founder and CEO – Hasura.
The Hasura GraphQL Engine has been instrumental for our product, a cryptocurrency social research platform, by providing a seamless integration that allows us to rapidly generate high-performance, extensible GraphQL schemas on our existing DBs — using native SQL and Postgres. Leveraging the power of GraphQL and the latest in database tech (TimescaleDB + Postgres), Hasura GraphQL Engine has enabled us to provide a low-cost performant solution, resulting in a smooth, friendly end-user experience,” said Josh Davis, CTO of PlatinumX.
“Hasura and their team have saved me months of development work by allowing me to automate the creation and management of my backend with my industry standard technologies of choice — GraphQL and Postgres. I get to focus more of my time on building features while remaining confident that I have a performant back-end with common features like auth and permissions, which benefit from the constant Hasura Engine updates,” noted Jonathan Chhabra, front-end Engineer working on a stealth project based in Virginia.