Section’s CTO Daniel Bartholomew Discusses the ‘Why’ and ‘How’ of Distributing GraphQL in Computer Weekly

Recent reports have found that as much as 83% of all web traffic today is the result of API calls. Although REST APIs are still widely used, GraphQL is a flexible and efficient alternative query language and server-side runtime for cloud APIs – and its usage has skyrocketed from 6% in 2016 to 47% in 2020.

While its advantages are significant, many developers become frustrated with latency challenges when implementing GraphQL. The nature of the GraphQL structure means that caching responses for improved performance can be a significant challenge (you may have heard someone say “GraphQL breaks caching” or “GraphQL is not cacheable”).

The secret to making GraphQL more efficient is distributing those GraphQL API servers so they operate – only and always – closer to end users, where and when needed. If you can reduce last-mile latency between your users and your code, they will see an immediate boost in their user experience.

This is why we recently launched a Distributed GraphQL service that allows organizations to quickly launch and easily scale location-optimized, multi-cloud API servers. With this new service, organizations can host GraphQL in data centers across town or around the world to improve API performance and reliability, lower costs, decrease impact on back-end servers, and improve scalability, resilience, compliance, security and more. And they can do all of this without impacting their current cloud native development processes or tools.

Section Co-Founder & CTO Daniel Bartholomew recently contributed to technology journalist Adrian Bridgwater’s recurring “API series” column for the Computer Weekly Developer Network. In Bridgwater’s column, Bartholomew goes into more detail around the ‘why’ and ‘how’ organizations would want to distribute GraphQL servers. In this article, Bartholomew also explores some of the challenges associated with GraphQL when trying to connect data across a distributed architecture.

Read more about how to solve GraphQL latency challenges by deploying your application closer to your users.