Solo.io Brings GraphQL to Istio, Allowing Developers to Easily Query Distributed Applications and Microservices

GraphQL: A Standardized Approach… with Growing Pains

GraphQL is an open-source data query language for APIs that has grown in popularity among enterprises seeking to simplify client-server interactions. GraphQL provides a powerful and flexible alternative to REST for requesting data from microservices applications. It provides declarative data fetching, with a client specifying exactly what data it needs from an API and underlying services through a single endpoint. Even as backend services and data sources change, the API doesn’t change from the client’s perspective. Although GraphQL provides a consistent and predictable API, the code, time, and effort required to build the GraphQL server to respond to requests can be considerable. Too often developers must write specific libraries for caching, security, rate-limiting, failover, and many other functions.

“GraphQL significantly increases developer velocity because it makes it dramatically easier to consume APIs. However, developers still need to write a significant amount of code to handle access control, caching, security, federation, and reliability,” said Idit Levine, founder and CEO, Solo.io. “By adding GraphQL support to Gloo Mesh and Gloo Edge, we are saving developers the task of writing code in specific libraries and allowing them to tap the service mesh and API gateway for this functionality.”

Solo.io’s GraphQL extensions for Envoy and Istio service mesh will enable developers to declaratively define GraphQL schema and server capabilities, including role-based access control (RBAC) using the familiar YAML programming language. It will auto-generate schema from almost any data source including REST, gRPC, SQL, SOAP, and additional data sources. The GraphQL module will enhance the Envoy Proxy filter chain in Gloo Mesh and Gloo Edge with a resolver that gives Envoy the ability to provide a GraphQL API endpoint. Developers can also write customer resolvers with Web Assembly (Wasm) to extend the API infrastructure to meet specific needs.

“Even though GraphQL allows you to describe schemas and provides the query language to retrieve data from those schemas, service developers still need to write code to manage access control, security, rate-limiting, and other API concerns,” said Yuval Kohavi, chief architect at Solo.io. “With our GraphQL extensions for Envoy and Istio, developers can auto-generate schema and use the declarative configuration capabilities of Gloo Mesh to define connectivity, security, and even observability capabilities.”