Announcing GraphQL Hive, the complete GraphQL API manager

This article was published on Tuesday, May 24, 2022 by Charly Poly @ The Guild Blog

After months of development and collecting feedback from our customers using it in production, we
are incredibly excited to share with you today the public launch of
Hive!

Built for the Community, for All GraphQL APIs

GraphQL Hive has been built with 3 main objectives in mind:

• Help GraphQL developers to get to know their GraphQL APIs a little more with our schema registry, performance monitoring, alerts, and integrations.
• Support all kinds of GraphQL APIs, from Federation, and Stitching, to standalone APIs.
• Open Source at the heart: GraphQL Hive is 100% open-source, and build in public with the community.
• A plug and play SaaS solution: to give access to Hive to most people with a generous free “Hobby plan”

Without further ado, let's review together how GraphQL Hive will help you to get the best of your
GraphQL APIs.

Features Overview

GraphQL Hive provides all the tools to get visibility of your GraphQL architecture at all stages,
from standalone APIs to composed schemas
(Federation, Stitching).

From our experience working in the GraphQL field, we believe that the following set of features
are essential for a good understanding and operating of GraphQL APIs, at any stage.

Schema Registry

Using Hive requires publishing changes to your GraphQL API schema. Once published on the Schema
Registry, Hive will offer 3 useful features to manage your GraphQL API:

Get warned about breaking changes. For every new version of the schema either committed in a
Pull Request or publish, Hive will run a set of checks and notify your team via Slack, GitHub, or
within the Hive application.

The definition of a “breaking change” is data-driven (based on "live operations monitoring") and
entirely configurable for each project:

The schema changes detection also applies in a Federation setup, when a given subgraph breaks the
composed supergraph.

Access the history of changes. On top of detecting potential breaking changes, Hive gives your
team access to the full history of changes, even on a complex composed schema (Federation,
Stitching).

Hive can also be configured to post the detected schema changes to Slack, fostering collaboration
between the front-end and back-end engineers.

Supercharge your GraphQL development workflow. Finally, Hive provides a high-availability and
multi-zone CDN service based on Cloudflare, allowing you to access the registry, through a secured
external service, that's always up regardless of Hive services.

This secured URL, generated from the Hive UI, can be used to supercharge your GraphQL development
workflow, by:

• updating your GraphQL Code Generator config to fetch the introspection from Hive CDN, instead of production, staging, or local version of your GraphQL API
• updating your GraphQL Gateway to fetch the schema from Hive CDN instead of querying all services
• updating your GraphQL Mesh configuration to fetch a GraphQL Source schema from Hive CDN

Doing so will avoid deployment issues and development issues (ex: getting introspection for codegen
from the wrong development version of the schema).

More examples are available in Hive documentation:
https://the-guild.dev/graphql/hive/docs/high-availability-cdn.

The three aspects of Schema Registry covered above will help you a safer and smoother deployment
of your GraphQL APIs, even when working with standalone or monolithic GraphQL APIs.

Monitoring

Once a Schema is deployed, it is important to be aware of how it is used and what is the
experience of its final users.

GraphQL Hive helps you get a global overview of the usage of your GraphQL API with:

• Error rates and repartition
• Global and queries performances (latency, RPM…)
• Operations count
• Active GraphQL clients

At a glance, the Hive operations dashboard helps you to understand:

• Does your GraphQL API face unexpected traffic?
• Does a new version of Schema result in a raise of errors?
• Which queries are slow?

Being able to quickly answer these questions allows you to build better GraphQL APIs and better user
experiences.

Integrations

Hive is well integrated with Slack and most CI/CD systems to get you up and running as smoothly
as possible!

As covered earlier, Hive can notify your team when schema changes occur, either via Slack or a
custom webhook:

Also, the Hive CLI allows integration of the schema checks mechanism to all CI/CD systems
(GitHub, BitBucket, Azure, and others).

To compare new schema with the latest one and detect breaking changes, run the following command:

hive schema:check schema.graphql

The same applies for schema publishing and operations checks.

If you are using GitHub, you can directly benefit from the Hive app that will automatically add
status checks to your PRs!

And we are just getting started, we are already planning more alerts/notifications types and more
integrations.

Get Started with GraphQL Hive

By far the easiest way to use GraphQL Hive is to get started with one of our hosted plans below.

Our hobby plan is free and fits perfectly for most side projects. When you're ready to upgrade,
we have you covered with our Pro plan.

All plans come with unlimited seats, high availability and all the features.

You can now give more insight into your GraphQL API's performance by inviting all of your team to
your project.

Pricing

As you can see, the pricing is based on real usage and not the number of seats.

You can start for free with the "Hobby" plan and upgrade to "Pro" once you hit the limits.

If you need more than the Pro plan, let us know, and we
can discuss your requirements.

GraphQL Hive Can Be Self-Hosted

As stated earlier, GraphQL Hive is completely open-source
under the MIT license, meaning that you are free to host on your own infrastructure.

You will find instructions in the GitHub repository and feel free
to contact us for any questions or support.

Join Us in Building the Future of Hive

Like all The Guild projects, GraphQL Hive is built with the community.

We can't wait to get you onboard and get your feedback, pull
requests, and feature requests on
https://github.com/graphql-hive.

See you in Hive! 🐝