How GraphQL Works at LinkedIn

The diagram above shows how LinkedIn adopts GraphQL.

“Moving to GraphQL was a huge initiative that changed the development workflow for thousands of engineers…” [1]

The overall workflow after adopting GraphQL has 3 parts:

Part 1 - Edit and Test a Query

Steps 1-2: The client-side developer develops a query and tests with backend services.

Part 2 - Register a Query

Steps 3-4: The client-side developer commits the query and publishes the query to the query registry.

Part 3 - Use in Production

Step 5: The query is released together with the client code.

Steps 6-7: The routing metadata is included with each registered query. The metadata is used at the traffic routing tier to route the incoming requests to the correct service cluster.

Step 8: The registered queries are cached at service runtime.

Step 9: The sample query goes to the identity service first to retrieve members and then goes to the organization service to retrieve company information.

LinkedIn doesn’t deploy a GraphQL gateway for two reasons:

1. Prevent an additional network hop
2. Avoid single point of failure