Armin Aminian

Kafka sits at the heart of how we move data between systems at trivago. Many teams publish changes to Kafka, and downstream services consume those changes to keep user-facing features up to date—things like accommodation reviews, highlights, and other derived attributes.

Over the last year trivago refactored the existing GraphQL monolith and moved to a microservice architecture, in what is also known as a federated setup. Federated GraphQL, as championed by Apollo, represents a significant shift in how companies architect and scale their GraphQL ecosystems, especially when transitioning from monolithic designs to microservice-based architectures. In a federated setup, each microservice maintains its own GraphQL schema, relevant to the domain it serves. These individual schemas are then seamlessly stitched together into a unified gateway. This gateway serves as the single access point for clients, enabling them to query data across multiple services as if it were coming from a single, monolithic GraphQL API. Such change involves also a completely new approach to the test and delivery, with the goal of empowering developers to quickly and safely deploy to production autonomously.