QLoo — Glue together your Application Data with GraphQL

Since it was open-sourced almost 3 years ago, GraphQL has taken a central place at the forefront of API development. GraphQL provides a strongly typed query language and high-performance, cost-saving runtime for service APIs.

From the official GraphQL website: GraphQL provides a complete and understandable description of the data in your API, gives clients the power to ask for exactly what they need and nothing more.

Because of its powerful features and growing community, we choose GraphQL over REST for our own software APIs. Working with GraphQL for greenfield development is a wonderful experience. You design your schema first, then build your API from the bottom-up.

But what happens when you want to connect to existing APIs already defined in other services? This becomes a task of API translation and routing, left to the developer to reason about, design, and ultimately implement. Adding GraphQL on top of existing software comes at a cost of added complexity, logic, and development time.

For this reason we wrote QLoo, an API translation layer to connect GraphQL endpoints to existing services as well as serverless functions. Based on our vision for Gloo — our function gateway, which “glues” all the components that compose a software system — QLoo unifies REST APIs, gRPC services, and serverless functions under a single GraphQL API service. QLoo automatically constructs logic for making external API calls based on user configuration, saving developers time and effort.

Another major feature of QLoo is that it leverages a self-managed Envoy Proxy for all its calls to external services. Envoy adds features such as encryption, authentication, monitoring and metrics with no effort by the user.

We believe building GraphQL endpoints with QLoo will make the burgeoning GraphQL ecosystem more accessible to traditional API developers, all while supercharging API management with Envoy’s powerful suite of security and visibility features. We encourage you to check out our repository and start QLooing today!