Globoplay leverages the supergraph to unify and boost its customer experience

Developed by Grupo Globo in 2015, Globoplay is the largest streaming service in Brazil. To capitalize on new subscribers, retain existing customers, and compete in the streaming market, Globoplay needed to unify its customer experiences and innovate faster.

Marcelo Nalon, Staff Engineer at Globoplay says that “The monolith required a duplicated effort when modeling the graph data. We needed to model the entities in each data source that the gateway consumed and in the schema defined by itself. Releasing new pieces on the graph required a lot of orchestration between developers that dealt with different domains. Also, having an entire schema and all the logic for the resolvers defined in one place caused complexity overhead.”

To help their teams ramp up and adopt the supergraph the developers are encouraged to use Apollo’s tutorial and learning program, . According to Marcelo Nalon, “Apollo Odyssey helps us train new employees and keep the team updated with new features. Odyssey is proving to be an amazing way to help the team feel more comfortable with the framework and our subgraphs.”

“Apollo GraphOS is a key platform for the development team to work safely with GraphQL. It provides a bunch of tools and APIs that allow us to establish a secure development pipeline to compose and deliver new pieces to our supergraph.”

Marcelo Nalon, Staff Engineer at Globoplay

Another benefit achieved with the supergraph was the improvement in how experimentation was being delivered for the end users, especially during Big Brother Brazil. We started to run experiments 10x faster, delivering them as part of our GraphQL API, so reflecting the experiments straight to all end users. Also, the federated architecture empowered us with the confidence to run experiments even if something went down with them, using strategies to gracefully degrade some pieces of the graph without impacting the critical pieces for the users’ experience. – Marcelo Nalon

Another added benefit is the since it enables them to check queries and resolve problems as they arise. Marcelo Nalon expresses that “Apollo GraphOS is a key platform for the development team to work softly with GraphQL. It provides a bunch of tools and APIs that allow us to establish a secure development pipeline to compose and deliver new pieces to our supergraph. Also, it allows the clients to check problems with the operations their apps can do through the supergraph before deploying new versions with them”

GraphOS also helps them discover new areas to improve their product and also gives insights about which deprecated fields could be securely removed from the supergraph. (In one week the graph maintainers were able to remove about 20 deprecated fields).

Marcelo Nalon is eager to continue partnering with the Apollo team to ensure supergraph success at scale. He says, “Teamwork with Apollo has been crucial to us. We are supported on any critical decision we need to take to achieve our goals and we are always encouraged to have a collaborative relationship with the GraphQL community.”