Reconciling GraphQL and Thrift at Airbnb

For several years, we had a few eager advocates for GraphQL at Airbnb, but the project never quite made it through the gates largely due to the perception that “GraphQL the Religion”—a worldview where all data is a graph all the way down—would be incompatible with our particular services-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy, which defines service-to-service communication using Thrift Interface Definition Language (IDL) and delivers data to clients via dedicated Presentation Services. We recently reframed a case for “GraphQL the API Layer.” Embracing how GraphQL could complement rather than compete with our Presentation Services, it found much more traction.

I’d like to tell you why and how we set things up the way we did, in case you’re in a similar place and weighing similar tradeoffs.

Source: medium.com