From REST to distributed GQL

Talk video

Talk presentation

In this talk, I'll share how we migrated from REST API to GQL at Preply, and how we adopted it to our microservice architecture.

GQL has become more widely used in recent years because it makes work faster and easier for FE teams. However, many BE developers believe that GQL APIs hurt app performance and make code more coupled. In addition, there's a prejudice that it's hard to migrate a big application from REST to GQL.

I'll focus on the main benefits of the migration, as well as some edge cases we faced:

• 1.5 month GQL PoC & migration process;
• impact on developers and app performance;
• how we kept one graphql endpoint while having many microservice backends for GQL;
• how we manage schema evolution and avoid breaking changes.