Serverless GraphQL with Tanmai Gopal

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Modern web development tools have given frontend developers more power.

On the frontend, JavaScript frameworks like React and Vue have become easier to work with. For deployment, tools like Netlify and Zeit give developers a workflow that is tightly integrated with GitHub. At the database layer, autoscaling document storage systems like Firebase and hosted Mongo solutions make it easier to work with objects.

There are also a multitude of APIs that give developers rich business functionality out of the box, making it easy to build applications around SMS, payments, and computer vision. If you are building a new application today, you have the option to build it around a completely “serverless” architecture.

As the backend and frontend have changed, the middleware to communicate between those layers has also evolved. GraphQL is a modern way of fetching data from disparate data sources.

In previous episodes, we have talked about how GraphQL works, and some common patterns for using GraphQL in mature applications. In today’s episode, Tanmai Gopal joins the show to describe how to use GraphQL in newer applications. Tanmai is the CEO of Hasura, a company building tools around GraphQL. He discusses the advantages of using serverless functions together with GraphQL, and how to architect an event-based serverless application.

Transcript

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