Using YugabyteDB with Hasura to scale your GraphQL API globally

@VladimirNovick

vnovick.com

Software Architect & consultant

Web / Mobile / VR / AR / IoT / AI

GDE, author, engineer

@VladimirNovick

vnovick.com

CTO & Co-founder

creating a robust, performant, and feature-rich online conferencing experience

eventloop.ai

@EventLoopHQ

Microservices architecture

3factor.app Architecture

https://3factor.app/

GraphQL

A query language for your API

What is Hasura

open source and free engine that gives you auto-generated real-time GraphQL API on top of new or existing Postgres database

Features

Can be deployed to any cloud or run locally
Compatible with all Authentication solutions
Can run on top of new or existing Postgres database
Supports Postgres addons (PostGIS, TimescaleDB)
Auto-generates GraphQL api
GraphQL queries are compiled to performant SQL statements using native Postgres features

Features

Comes with hasura-cli which has awesome tools like migrations and more
Can work with custom SQL statements
Has configurable access controls for data
Can be connected to your own GraphQL server (does schema stitching)
Has eventing system which enables to trigger serverless functions

Let's see it in action

we will run Hasura locally

What about scaling

What about some numbers?

Single instance configuration	No. of active live queries	CPU load average
1xCPU, 2GB RAM	5000	60%
2xCPU, 4GB RAM	10000	73%
4xCPU, 8GB RAM	20000	90%

Postgres is under about 28% load with peak number of connections being around 850

https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine/blob/master/architecture/live-queries.md

image source: https://dev.to/lineup-ninja/deploying-hasura-on-aws-with-fargate-rds-and-terraform-4gk7

What is YugabyteDB

open-source, high-performance distributed SQL database for powering global, internet-scale applications.

What is YugabyteDB

Built using combination of

high performance document store
per-shard distributed consensus replication
multi-shard ACID transactions (inspired by Google Spanner)

cloud-native database!

public/private clouds
Kubernetes environments

What is YugabyteDB

What it brings:

PostgreSQL-compatible SQL API
low-latency read performance
globally distributed write scalability

Let's see it in action:

https://docs.yugabyte.com/latest/quick-start/

I will use local Mac install

./bin/yb-ctl create --rf 3 --tserver_flags "ysql_suppress_unsupported_error=true"

Create Yugabyte cluster

Cluster Admin UI (localhost:7000)

Run Hasura on top of YugabyteDB

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -e \
HASURA_GRAPHQL_DATABASE_URL=postgres://postgres:@host.docker.internal:5433/yugabyte \
-e HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLE_CONSOLE=true hasura/graphql-engine:latest

Note that port number is 5433

Now let's access Hasura console and see it in action

Run Hasura on top of YugabyteDB

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -e \
HASURA_GRAPHQL_DATABASE_URL=postgres://postgres:@host.docker.internal:5433/yugabyte \
-e HASURA_GRAPHQL_ENABLE_CONSOLE=true hasura/graphql-engine:latest

Note that port number is 5433

Now let's access Hasura console and see it in action

Let's simulate downtime