GraphQL’s New Superpower: Breaking Change Checks

As an API solution architect, the evolution from REST to GraphQL has been a pivotal shift in my approach to designing and managing APIs at scale. REST, with its OpenAPI specification, has long dominated the landscape. Yet it presents numerous challenges, especially in versioning and aligning real-world API consumer usage with your API specification.
Fed up with REST and OpenAPI, my journey with GraphQL began as a search for agility and precision in API management. This quest led me to the transformative power of GraphQL and its ecosystem of open source and commercial tools and libraries.
The Transformation Started by GraphQL Federation
The GraphQL query language has matured significantly over the years, and its introduction into enterprise API management has marked a new era of efficiency and scalability. GraphQL Federation has revolutionized how we handle APIs in a microservices architecture, allowing API architects to build a unified GraphQL supergraph API. This is crucial in an enterprise environment where managing numerous APIs efficiently is critical to operational success. I’ve worked with organizations with over 100 GraphQL microservices that combine into a single supergraph API!
Breaking Change Checks: A Game Changer
GraphQL’s “breaking change checks” are a game-changer for modern API management. This feature allows API development teams to leverage API usage metrics from GraphQL clients to assess the impact of any proposed changes to your GraphQL schema. By continuously monitoring GraphQL queries, teams can track the usage of every type, field and directive, gaining invaluable insights into how APIs are consumed in real time. Then, using a GraphQL API management tool, developers can get instant feedback on whether their proposed schema changes will break existing GraphQL clients.
This continuous monitoring and testing with breaking change checks go beyond traditional API contract testing. Breaking change checks ensures backward compatibility, a critical factor in maintaining trust with API consumers and avoiding disruptions. Integrating these checks into continuous integration (CI) pipelines ensures that any potential breaking changes are detected and addressed before they can affect production environments. This proactive approach enables fast and safe API evolution.
While breaking change checks is cool, does it work in practice? The answer is yes, as I have implemented it for my own GraphQL API and with customers/clients working as an API solution architect. The hardest part is not the tool implementation but the process changes to using breaking change checks daily, both locally and in CI pipelines. Developers are generally not used to rigorous API testing, and breaking change checks is a new concept. But once the team gets the hang of it, breaking change checks quickly becomes indispensable as a confidence builder that existing API consumers will continue to be supported in the next GraphQL API release.
Conclusion: Why GraphQL Represents the Future of APIs
GraphQL, supported by breaking change checks, positions API development teams advantageously over REST in managing the life cycle of APIs in a dynamic and fast-paced development environment. Tools for managing GraphQL APIs, both open source and commercial, offer comprehensive solutions that provide deep insights into API usage and development, safeguarding the API evolution process.
After I learned GraphQL and implemented GraphQL API management tools myself, I find it painful to go back to the old ways of REST and OpenAPI. So do yourself a favor and give GraphQL a try, aiming to adopt the latest tools, such as breaking change checks. It’s the future of APIs.