Jonathan Helvey

[Dr Milan Milanović @milan_milanovic]

𝗡𝗲𝘁𝗳𝗹𝗶𝘅 𝗿𝗲𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝘁 𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗔𝗣𝗜 𝗹𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀

Netflix's highly scalable and loosely linked microservice architecture is well known. Independent services provide independent scaling and varied rates of evolution. Yet, they increase the complexity of use cases involving several services. Netflix provides a uniform API aggregation layer at the edge rather than making hundreds of microservices available to UI developers.

During that time, Netflix API architecture went through 4 main stages:

🔹 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗵: A complete application is packaged as a single deployment unit.

🔹 𝗗𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀: This architecture enables client apps to hit the microservices, which is not ideal with many clients.

🔹 𝗚𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝗔𝗴𝗴𝗿𝗲𝗴𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗟𝗮𝘆𝗲𝗿: as they observed a lot of duplicative data-fetching, here Netflix build graph API to provide unified abstraction on top of data and relationships.

🔹 𝗙𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗚𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘄𝗮𝘆: as the number of consumers and amount of data in the graph increased and the API team was disconnected from the domain expertise, they introduced a federated gateway to provide a unified API for consumers while giving backend developers flexibility and service isolation.

Their GraphQL Gateway is based on Apollo's reference implementation and is written in Kotlin.

How many layers sit between your services and your users?

[Jonathan Helvey @JonathanHelvey]

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👇2026

[Jonathan Helvey @JonathanHelvey]

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