DEV Community

Cover image for Unifying data with Hasura GraphQL Engine & Azure functions
Burke Holland for Microsoft Azure

Posted on

Unifying data with Hasura GraphQL Engine & Azure functions

GraphQL is one of the newer and more fascinating paradigms for web APIs. The idea is that instead of trying to build APIs which return data for every scenario, you build a generic set of APIs which can return exactly what the frontend developer needs. Essentially, GraphQL gives the frontend developer the ability to query the database in the way that they need without having to implement new endpoints.

Now that sounds great and all, but if you're like a lot of developers, you already have a set of APIs, a mountain of technical debt that you inherited from previous developers, and a disparate system of relational databases. Sometimes it feels like you will never get to play with the new toys.

Trust me. I know that feeling so very, very well.

The folks at Hasura have been hard at work solving this problem for GraphQL. Hasura is a system that you stand up in front of your database. It then allows you to expose data in that database as a GraphQL API. No new services needed.

But as you know, getting just the data is only half the battle. If only life were just that easy. Often, you need an API that actually does something. Perhaps it performs some sort of calculation on the data set or even runs it through a machine learning model. Hasura lets you hook into the calls made to the API, handle them with custom code and then return custom data as part of the results set.

In this session at CREATE : Serverless, I'll be speaking with Allison Kuntz from Hasura on how Hasura works, why it makes GraphQL easy, and how you can extend any API call with a little Serverless.

See you there!

Add Create : Serverless to your calendar 👉 https://createserverless2020.splashthat.com/

Top comments (0)