DEVOPSdigest

Hasura announced the V3 of its platform, providing on-demand API composability with a new domain-centric supergraph modeling framework, a distributed supergraph execution engine and a rich and extensible ecosystem of open source connectors to address the challenges faced during integration of data and APIs.

The new platform also features a new build system, with instant API previews and rollback, and a redesigned console featuring a graphical supergraph viewer, API analytics, observability, and auto-generated API documentation.

“While the data layer that feeds modern applications has grown increasingly complex, API strategies needed to deliver data to the applications have not evolved to keep up,” said Torsten Volk, Managing Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). “As a result, teams are spending more time finding and understanding data, composing APIs, and building bespoke integration layers than shipping new features. The supergraph is a powerful paradigm that has the potential to solve these challenges by providing a unified semantic graph that connects all data – no matter the source – and making it available via one composable endpoint. Platforms like Hasura that not only make it easier for organizations to create and manage supergraphs, but layer new functionality that makes it easier to visualize and utilize data on top of that, are providing strong value at every level of the org chart today.”

Applications are powered by a complex data layer composed of multiple databases, services, and APIs, and new feature development is often bottlenecked while teams work to determine how to aggregate and deliver necessary data from this complex data backend to the frontend/client. The Hasura Data Delivery Network (DDN) completely dissolves this pain. By simply specifying how data domains are connected, users can create a performant API that handles any complex, composite query.

Features in Hasura V3 include:

- Self-serve composability: Complex data aggregations, like nested joins and nested filters, are incredibly hard to do and make consuming data from multiple sources onerous. Hasura-powered supergraphs deliver unparalleled composability in an API through the simple act of declaring how domains are related. This is made possible by innovations in the Hasura connector design and a new engine architecture.

- Domain-centric supergraph modeling framework: This first-of-its-kind supergraph modeling framework is the fastest way to create and evolve a supergraph. Defining a supergraph is as easy as specifying how the entities and domains are related. It eliminates the need to create GraphQL servers or services to enable a supergraph. The modeling framework is data agnostic, allowing users to easily onboard new domains or swap out underlying data sources (e.g., PostgreSQL → ClickHouse) without breaking the supergraph.

- Distributed supergraph execution engine: The Hasura supergraph modeling framework is backed by a rearchitected serverless runtime engine (written in RUST) that is built to operate the supergraph at scale, ensuring performance, reliability, and security. With an efficient query compiler and router, a distributed edge network, and edge routing and edge caching (coming soon), users get global low latency and high availability in their APIs without any extra operational overhead. A new sub-millisecond cold start enables rapid autoscaling to deal with usage spikes.

- Open source Connector Hub: Connectors are the special sauce that compiles the supergraph query into the most performant database query. All Hasura connectors have been rebuilt using a new open specification and are available as open source on the Hasura Connector Hub. Verified open source Hasura connectors announced today include PostgreSQL, Yugabyte, CockroachDB, Citus, Timescale DB, Neon, Google Cloud SQL, AlloyDB, AWS Aurora PostgreSQL, AzureDB PostgreSQL, and CosmosDB PostgreSQL. Hasura also today released SDKs that make it easy for anyone to build a custom connector.

- Build system, with instant API previews and rollback: Every iteration of the Hasura supergraph (changes to relations, permissions, data sources, etc.) is instantly available as an immutable build and testable via a preview API. Any build can be promoted to production (or rolled back) with zero downtime.

- Pre-commit validation enables rapid iteration without fear of breaking changes: Every change to the supergraph is validated before build, letting users identify potential bugs, stylistic issues, syntax, and type errors. This ensures an error-free build and preview API. Build-time checks also ensure that changes in one part of the supergraph don't violate the expected contracts with other parts of the supergraph.

- Supergraph viewer and API documentation: The brand-new Hasura console features a supergraph viewer that visually shows how everything connects and is especially helpful as the supergraph evolves with new data and relations. The console also features rich API documentation that enables rapid onboarding of new API consumer teams onto the supergraph.

“We built the Hasura Data Delivery Network to answer a couple of hard questions,” said Tanmai Gopal, co-founder and CEO of Hasura. ‘‘One, ‘What if you could fetch just the data you need from any number of enterprise sources and deliver it to any client or user worldwide quickly, securely, and reliably?’ Two, ‘What if you had rich self-serve composability via a unified API?’ Last, ‘What if the effort of building and operating such a delivery network for data was trivial?’ Hasura V3 answers these questions and gives teams the power of a supergraph to streamline and simplify the dev and ops workflows that go into serving data from any source to the end user via fast, secure, flexible, and reliable APIs. In today’s world of accelerating data and backend sprawl, the supergraph is a must-have.”

Components of Hasura V3 will be made available throughout the month of April in beta.