GraphQL at Scale: Overcoming Unique Challenges at Booking.com

🍕 Free event with pizzas and drinks

⚡ Level: this is an advance GraphQL meetup where we share our learnings and what to hear yours. Consider joining the event if you’re already familiar with GraphQL. Talks will not cover what GraphQL is or how it works.

🗓️ Date & Time: November 18th (Monday) at 18:00 CET.

📍 Location: Booking.com HQ @ Oosterdokskade 163, Amsterdam

⚠️ Security: all visitors need to bring any form of identification for the registration. Please make sure your RSVP details match the name & surname in your ID.

🕒 Event Schedule:

17:30 — Walk in, Drinks & Pizza 🍕
18:30 — Talks:

• Adopting GraphQL, Scaling it, Fixing Reliability and Making it Solve Unique Problems by Alex Komlev
• Schema Scoring: Ensuring Schema Excellence in GraphQL by Christian Ernst

19:30 — Questions, Discussions, Networking
20:30 — Doors close

💬 Talks:

1. Adopting GraphQL, Scaling it, Fixing Reliability and Making it Solve Unique Problems
   🎤 Speaker: Alex Komlev, Sr. Engineering Manager @ Booking.com Platform. Alex brought GraphQL to Booking.com in 2020, proved its value and helped scaling it to all parts of the business.

Why did we choose GraphQL?
How did we make our product managers love it?
What else helps to overcome organizational resistance?
How did we hit our first limits?
Why we moved from Java to NodeJS? And why we're discussing Rust?
What happened when we couldn’t access our schema? And why this was a great lesson?
What's needed to make a GraphQL layer five nines reliable?
How to scale support to hundreds of internal clients?
What's in our multiyear data access strategy?
And... how many GraphQL engineers does it take to change a light bulb?

2. Schema Scoring: Ensuring Schema Excellence in GraphQL
   🎤 Speaker: Christian Ernst, Sr. Engineer @ Booking.com GraphQL team. Chris took care of Booking GraphQL Federation since its infancy, and multiple times saved the company together with millions of dollars. Chris is also a NodeJS expert and a serial speaker!

At Booking.com we have scaled to over 120+ subgraphs and that number continues to grow. As subgraphs develop it has begun to be impossible for one to team to oversee all of the changes to the graph. We created best practices and guidelines for GraphQL schemas, but soon recognised we need to track the quality of schemas automatically and in a way that can provide actionable feedback to teams. At Booking.com we have developed the infrastructure to analyse schemas beyond standard linting to help improve the quality of the Graph across the board enabling better efficiency & developer experience for everyone.

💡 What we will discuss:

• GraphQL Federation vs monolithic GraphQL
• Major GraphQL flows and how to prevent them
• Challenges with defining GraphQL layer SLOs
• Non-trivial GraphQL use cases (e.g. service-to-service)
• Centralized vs distributed information architecture
• Can we trust client-side engineers & random queries?
• Quality of GraphQL schema & ways to automate it

———

Looking forward to welcoming you and discussing our and your unique GraphQL practices! 👋