Today we’re thrilled to announce the next milestone in our journey to build the content platform of the future. GraphCMS is now Hygraph.
Our refreshed identity and new look reinforce the commitment we have made toward enabling outstanding digital experiences on day one. We're also proud to introduce Content Federation, a new set of features enabling our users to unify all their backend services into one universal content API and serve third-party or programmatically created content alongside editorial content.
#Introducing the Federated Content Platform
While cross-platform content consumption and API-first delivery became the new normal, content architectures are growing increasingly complex again.
With the rise of best-of-breed systems design and modular architectures, content is now maintained in a myriad of disconnected data silos, resulting in an overwhelming complexity. The risk of serving outdated data and lack of data consistency in distributed architectures is becoming a maintenance burden.
Many organizations perceive custom middleware development as a solution to these challenges, but building and maintaining this is time-consuming and complex.
With the new Content Federation capability, you can bring content from other systems and sources to the Hygraph API, without having to migrate the content itself. There are many use cases where moving content into the content repository isn’t possible or desirable. Examples include content for which there is a different system of record (e-commerce/product data such as price or availability, content from a different vendor such as GitHub or IMDB) and content that is maintained in legacy systems that can’t be easily migrated.
Our concept of Remote Sources allows customers to extend Hygraph’s Content API with content from all these different sources, providing flexibility for front-end developers and downstream applications.
The Hygraph Content Federation architecture consists of the following components:
- Remote source: a system or product that holds content that needs to be combined with content in Hygraph, and which can be queried through a RESTful or GraphQL API.
- Custom type: a GraphQL type that is used for content coming from a remote source.
- Remote field: a field inside a Hygraph model that connects specific remote data to an entry of that model.
- Configurable cache: a TTL based caching layer that guarantees optimal API performance for remote content.
Hygraph allows true composability of your tech stack while taking away the heavy-lifting in the backend. Content federation leads to a massive reduction in development time and costs when integrating with multiple APIs.
That said, the benefits are not limited to the cost of ownership. Content Federation also removes risks related to data integrity by always delivering up-to-date content from your sources.
Read the full release announcement here.
#Reflecting on Our Journey
In 2017, we set out with a simple goal: to create the first headless content management system that is completely GraphQL native. Scaling & performance considerations were at the heart of our decisions. Today, we provide content API capabilities beyond the competition in function and scale.
Since then, developer experience has become one of our main value propositions. Developers in some of the most successful organizations make use of our powerful GraphQL APIs to continue building with their preferred workflows, languages, frameworks, tools, and services.
Today, Hygraph powers over 50,000 projects, including those at companies like Dr.Oetker, Philips, Samsung, Ashley Furniture.
During this journey, we stayed committed to a few important pillars we deem important for our community.
Our commitment to GraphQL
Our goal is to provide the best technology and support possible to the GraphQL community so that you can build incredible products. We continue to invest in our GraphQL offering, with new features and improvements released every month.
We also contribute to the community via our involvement in the GraphQL foundation and GraphQL and GraphQL Scale Conferences.
Our commitment to Content & Collaboration
Content creation is a collaborative process. It takes a team of content creators to develop and execute a content strategy. That said, collaboration is not restricted to the confines of the creative team, we believe the collaboration with domain experts, development teams and business stakeholders, including external ones is equally important.
Hygraph allows you to manage and collaborate on your content pipeline with ease, speed, and safety thanks to fine-grained permissions and workflows, while decreasing dependency between developers and content creators thanks to features like components.
This week, we will also release the ability to set up nested components!
Our commitment to Extensibility
An opinionated monolith cannot keep up with the changing needs of your organization. Since our early days, we have advocated for existing and new investments working together.
The recent introduction of our marketplace is the fruition of this viewpoint. Hygraph Marketplace already covers major DAM, hosting, translation & personalization platforms.
Over the next weeks, our new App Framework will enter public beta which will allow for much better extensibility of the platform.
Our commitment to Performance
The Hygraph delivery infrastructure enables enterprise scale content distribution with high performance for large payloads aimed at global low latency.
No matter where in the world your team or audience is located, you can be confident in the performance of your content with Hygraph’s globally distributed infrastructure, 190 edge points of presence, and extremely powerful caching system.
With the launch of our new Content Federation capabilities, we are rolling out a much improved caching implementation for an even faster content delivery.
#About the Name
The Hygraph name is rooted in an amalgamation of Hypertext, one of the most important concepts behind the World Wide Web, and graph data structures which aligns well with the company’s vision of a future where the majority of the information humans and machines will process are highly complex, structured and connected.
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#PS: We’re Hiring!
Want to join a highly talented and ambitious team? Make sure to check out our open positions!
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