Implementing GraphQL API in Elixir – Victor Deryagin
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The document discusses Teachers Pay Teachers' experience implementing a GraphQL API in Elixir. Some key points: - TpT has used Elixir and GraphQL for around 2 years to power their API, handling 2000 requests per second and significant backend work. - Their tech stack includes Phoenix, Absinthe, Ecto, React/Apollo Client. Challenges included access control, evolving schemas, batching queries, and distributed tracing. - Absinthe provided features like middleware, introspection and separation of schemas. Elixir tools like OTP processes helped with scalability and robustness. - Overall they are happy with Elixir and GraphQL but note ongoing effort is
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Implementing GraphQL API in Elixir – Victor Deryagin
- 1. Implementing GraphQL API in Elixir By Victor Deryagin, Wise Engineering
- 2. What? ● GraphQL ● Our team’s experience of using Elixir for implementing TpT Graph API ● Other random thoughts and opinions . It will be fun
- 3. GraphQL ● Alternative web service architecture ● Released by Facebook in 2015 ● Single HTTP endpoint, POST, with query itself in payload ● Shape of response determined by query ● Client-oriented
- 4. Query/result example (GitHub API)
- 5. GraphQL == types + relationships ● Schema is defined on server ● Strict-ish type system ○ Basic scalar types: Int/Float/String/Boolean/Id ○ lists/objects/enums/unions ● Queries - get stuff ● Mutations - change stuff ● Subscriptions - get stream of stuff being changed
- 6. Resources ● https://graphql.org/learn ● https://facebook.github.io/graphql/draft ● Elixir Club 10 talk - “Craft effective API with GraphQL and Absinthe” ● Book: “Craft GraphQL APIs in Elixir with Absinthe”
- 7. Teachers Pay Teachers ● open since 2006 ● 5m+ active users (⅔ of teachers in US) ● 3m+ products ● ~60 engineers
- 8. TpT infrastructure ● AWS ● Terraform/Kubernetes/Docker ● MySQL, Redis, Memcached ● Hundreds of nodes
- 9. TpT Graph API ● Almost 2 years old ● 2k rps ● Handles significant proportion of work ● Almost all new backend feature development happens here
- 10. Server stack ● Elixir ● Phoenix (mostly its router) ● Absinthe ● Ecto, connected to legacy data stores
- 11. Client stack ● React ● Apollo client (js & iOS) ● Redux
- 12. Challenges ● Access control ● Schema structure ● Updating schema over time ● Keeping Apollo Client happy ● N+1 queries ● Multiprocessing ● Absinthe-specific stuff ○ Middleware (batching, async, etc.) ○ Absinthe pipeline
- 13. Introspection Enables powerful tools, makes one think carefully about what is exposed in the schema
- 14. Separation of schemas It’s easy to prevent field from being resolved, but we need a different approach to completely hide its existence
- 15. Structuring the schema Nested objects allow to contain complexity
- 16. Access control for free You only have to worry about limiting access to one field, everything under it is going to be protected
- 17. Batching ● Absinthe.Middleware.Batch ● DataLoader: https://github.com/absinthe-graphql/dataloader
- 19. Evolving schema ● Not too hard for private API ● Announce beforehand, make sure field/object usage is being monitored, in case there are remaining unchanged clients ● Pay more attention to schema design upfront, consider possible future changes, design for extensibility
- 20. Pleasing Apollo Client ● Make sure there are IDs on everything ● Being as specific as possible with mutations ● Wrapping mutation arguments in object, for easier subsequent changes ● Separate type for each mutation result, also for extensibility in the future ● Make sure to return everything that has changed, with ID attached ● Partial results can be a challenge
- 21. Using multiple BEAM processes for handling request ● Async and batched resolvers execute in separate processes ● Information specific to HTTP request is stored in process dictionary ○ Data needed for A/B testing ○ Data used for request tracing ○ Logger metadata ● Using agent to store all request-specific data & wrappers that copy stuff to dictionary of newly spawned processes
- 22. Other Absinthe stuff ● Processing queries is made in stages by phases of Absinthe pipeline ● Query goes through parsing, validation, analysis & execution, until transformed into response ● Custom phases can be inserted anywhere in pipeline ● Separating & batching resolvers to minimize the amount of work performed
- 23. Monitoring ● Individual fields/resolvers are easily instrumentable ● Per-pod metrics are useful for detecting runaway BEAM instances ● Some errors are easier to debug then others: Elixir.ErlangError: erlang error: :failed, gen_server.erl:812 - :gen_server.terminate/7
- 25. Distributed request tracing ● “Dapper” paper by Google: https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub36356 ● Zipkin/OpenTracing/Jaeger ● Poor man’s tracint with AWS ALB & X-Amzn-Request-Id header ● Active area of research & development
- 26. Testing ● Stateful testing is made harder than necessary by multiple legacy databases ● No async database tests :( ● Lots of GraphQL tests ● Satisfiably fast ● Looking into property testing
- 27. Summary ● Pretty happy with Elixir, both language itself, and adoption process ● Still in flux, effort required to stay up to date ● Llibrary ecosystem has some room for improvement, especially in breadth department ● Turned out to be easy to learn, including people with no fp background ● OTP with processes and supervision trees takes some getting used to ● GraphQL has a big potential, some rough edges still remain
- 28. More talks about Elixir @ TpT ● ElixirConf 2017 - Scaling up Elixir at TpT - Shanti Chellaram https://youtu.be/RwJAETlVrvs ● EMPEX LA 2018 - Panel: Elixir Adoption with Shanti Chellaram & Brandon Richey https://youtu.be/2TZOtdX1IAI ● Shanti Chellaram: The Best of Both Worlds: High Performance Recommendations with Elixir NIFs https://youtu.be/iL50Ss6Y85k
- 29. Thanks! Victor Deryagin [email protected] https://wise-engineering.com
- 30. Questions?