More Software Engineering Daily episodes
Published 5 Feb 2026
Duration: 55:45
Airbnb's Viaduct service mesh and GraphQL platform aims to streamline data access in microservices environments through a unified graph.
Engineering teams often build microservices as their systems grow, but over time this can lead to a fragmented ecosystem with scattered data access pa...
The podcast explores the development of Viaduct, a data-oriented service mesh and GraphQL platform built by Airbnb to manage the complexity of its fragmented microservices architecture. The system was initially created by a working group focused on unifying data access, minimizing duplication, and ensuring a consistent developer experience through the construction of a centralized data graph. Early iterations of Viaduct concentrated on presentation services, transforming Thrift APIs into a unified schema using schema stitching before the availability of Apollo Federation.
Viaduct's architecture features a tenant API, execution engine, and hosted code, designed to support re-entrancy, strong typing, and high performance for handling large-scale queries. The platform exists in two versionsClassic and Modernwith Modern aiming to enhance scalability, runtime efficiency, and developer experience by introducing better abstractions and async memoization. Although the goal is to open-source Viaduct Modern, some enterprise-level features remain internal. The discussion also touches on future trends, noting that GraphQL's flexible and unified data model may become increasingly important in AI-integrated systems, where structured and adaptable data access is crucial.
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