How Thinkific is Exposing a Public Supergraph
summary
Thinkific builds a centralized public supergraph that composes subgraphs from Rails engines and microservices, using Apollo Federation and Apollo Studio contracts plus the Rover CLI to run CI checks that block breaking changes. Versioning uses private/beta/stable routing so teams expose fields by tag (private by default); stable removals follow analytics-driven deprecation windows. The internal GraphQL grew past ~1,000 types, hundreds of branded mobile apps already consume the supergraph in beta, and the contract-based pipeline prevents client breakage.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction to Thinkific
- 0:57Early API development
- 3:27Scaling challenges
- 5:52Building the API team
- 7:39Unifying with GraphQL
- 10:45The super graph architecture
- 13:24API versioning strategy
- 15:48Tooling and developer control
- 18:55Results and future outlook
related talks
06mEscape the GraphQL Monolith
19mThe secrets to Graph success, from inception to general availability.
32mGraphQL Future
40mGraphQL: A Case Study
56mDistributed GraphQL APIs
48mApollo Federation: Connecting GraphQL Microservices
06mHow GraphQL & Apollo help drive Reddit's mission
50mDistributed GraphQL APIs: Breaking Down Monoliths & Unlocking Agility for Dev Teams