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WG Day:

Menlo Park, California
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Clarice Abreu, Rodrigo Jesus

Safely Merging Subgraphs in a Distributed World

Cortes Bank
Federation + Distributed System

Session description

In the rush to "break the monolith" through GraphQL Federation, organizations can go too far and end up with an explosion of subgraphs. At scale, this can lead to a different kind of pain: high operational overhead, reliability issues, and ultimately, a degraded graph quality. This session explores how to pivot from "splitting" to "merging" without impacting the customer. The presentation will dive into the workflow developed by Brex to consolidate federated subgraphs safely and reliably, covering: •⁠ ⁠The Why: Identifying the tipping point where service fragmentation hurts more than it helps. •⁠ ⁠The Strategy: A zero-downtime workflow for merging services covering code migration, schema composition and traffic shifting •⁠ ⁠Reliability: How to ensure schema integrity and 0 customer impact during the transition. •⁠ ⁠Outcomes: How the consolidation improved our graph design and simplified our overall architecture. Attendees will leave with a framework for evaluating when federation boundaries are hurting more than helping and a roadmap for executing a "subgraph smash" in their own federated infrastructure PS: I’m okay with decreasing the scope for a lightning talk if necessary


Session speakers

Clarice Abreu

Brex, Senior Software Engineer

Clarice Abreu leads the roadmap and strategy for the Brex's GraphQL platform. She drives initiatives to improve schema quality, schema validation and observability, helping teams build and evolve a large-scale federated GraphQL architecture.

Rodrigo Jesus

Brex, Senior Software Engineer

Rodrigo Jesus is a Senior Software Engineer at Brex's Application Infrastructure team focused on taming complexity in large distributed systems. He currently leads service smashing and domain consolidation efforts that reduce fragmentation, lower operational overhead, and improve reliability.

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COMMUNITYDEVELOPER EXPERIENCEAPIsTOOLS & LIBRARIESCOMMUNITYDEVELOPER EXPERIENCEAPIsTOOLS & LIBRARIES
OPEN SOURCEFEDERATIONECOSYSTEMSTRACING & OBSERVABILITYOPEN SOURCEFEDERATIONECOSYSTEMSTRACING & OBSERVABILITY
BEST PRACTICESWORKSHOPSSCHEMASSECURITYBEST PRACTICESWORKSHOPSSCHEMASSECURITY