DeveloperWeek 2019

The true power of GraphQL lies not just in its syntax but the fact that it makes it possible to reason about applications in ways we have never thought of before. The realtime bits of the GraphQL spec is one such horizons-widening abstraction when we use it as a tool to think about architecting an asynchronous, event-driven backend. Architecting the frontend of applications to consume a fundamentally async backend is still a challenge. GraphQL subscriptions and live-queries offer an opportunity to design a “reactive” contract between the backend and the frontend. In this model, an app makes a GraphQL mutation and then runs a GraphQL subscription to get updates as they happen. The business logic in serverless functions gets triggered automatically after the mutation and app gets success/error updates as and when they happen. With serverless functions, we get an auto-scalable, resilient backend which is perfect for processing asynchronous actions and stateless workloads. Such tasks include sending emails/push notifications, ETL, long running business logic etc. With no servers to provision and zero ops-tasks, it is very easy for a developer to write and deploy complex logic as functions in their favourite programming language.