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EXPEDIA GROUP TRANSFORMS PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT WITH APOLLO

Scaling the benefits of GraphQL with a cross-brand graph


KEY STATS

25
travel brands
200+
travel booking sites in 70+ countries
>1 in 3
transactions booked on mobile

As the world’s travel platform, Expedia Group manages customer experiences
across more than 200 booking sites and 25 brands including Brand Expedia,
Orbitz, Travelocity, Vrbo, Hotels.com and Egencia. Continuously improving these
experiences requires the creativity and careful orchestration of thousands of
developers and dozens of backend service teams. And because today’s travelers
increasingly use multiple touchpoints when planning, shopping and traveling,
ensuring a seamless experience across an ever-growing set of teams, geographies,
and capabilities poses a real challenge for Expedia Group.

“As you’d expect with a company of our history and scale, we operate multiple
technology stacks, most built in-house, some added during acquisitions, and a
few dating back to the dot-com era,” said Dan Boerner, Distinguished Product
Manager at Expedia Group. “As time progressed, that architectural complexity
began to leak into the customer experiences, and teams found themselves
duplicating work across platforms and managing ever-evolving service APIs rather
than creating next-generation travel solutions for our customers.”

Something had to be done. So a team within Brand Expedia set out to combine an
ambitious vision with an agile approach to completely transform the way they
build and deliver customer experiences.

Adopting a common graph while moving away from heavy clients with tight bindings
to REST APIs has been transformational. Features ship faster and it takes far
less effort to deliver great customer experiences across each of their client
platforms.


CHALLENGES OF A LARGE AND COMPLEX PLATFORM

Over the past decade, Brand Expedia group built a broad set of traditional REST
services for its native and web clients. In this model, each client front-end
was connected directly to a large number of underlying services.

While this approach worked, it slowed client teams down, as each team had to
learn about every API, onboard, and then configure specific endpoints. With
these APIs constantly evolving, improving, and moving to the cloud, it took more
and more time for both client and service teams to make progress together.

The rise of native mobile clients added more complexity. Mobile-tuned APIs were
created to serve those mobile applications, but that required an extra step each
time a new capability was added to the core service. As a result, native apps
ended up waiting for access to the latest features and the customer experiences
began to diverge between clients. Also, because the service APIs weren’t
designed to deliver display-ready content, each client platform had to duplicate
core business logic. Subtle differences in that logic, as well as
client-specific experiments, all contributed to a diverging customer experience
and a duplication of effort.

BEFORE ADOPTING A GRAPH: CLIENT AND SERVICE COMPLEXITY

As Boerner explained, “Much of the mobile app team’s work had nothing to do with
creating experiences for customers because they were constantly figuring out
which API to call, onboarding those APIs, and dealing with version and endpoint
changes. All of these distractions required additional resources and slowed our
feature delivery.”

Despite dedicated resources, the underlying problem persisted and continued to
affect the customer experience. “The client-service complexity became a real
bottleneck,” Boerner added. “Asking a native app team to keep track of tens of
service teams so they can escalate production issues became a source of real
frustration, and a real distraction for a team focused on creating great
customer experiences.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Much of the mobile app team’s work had nothing to do with creating experiences
for customers because they were constantly figuring out what API to call,
onboarding those APIs, and dealing with version and endpoint changes.”

Dan Boerner
Distinguished Product Manager at Expedia Group

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


EXPERIMENTING WITH A BACKEND-FOR-FRONTEND

When Brand Expedia group built their first Progressive Web App (PWA) for
Expedia, Travelocity, and Orbitz brands, they followed the Backend-for-Frontend
(BFF) pattern. The general approach held promise: let the BFF talk directly to
the services and present a clean, non-service-specific API to the front-end.
With this model, clients no longer had to include the business and orchestration
logic and could enjoy an API built just for them. It worked well initially, but
the teams quickly learned that BFFs just aren’t designed to scale. Since BFFs
are tuned for a single client— in this case, the web—to make it work everywhere,
Expedia Group would have had to write a BFF for each and every client platform,
with duplicated logic and custom code in each.

EXPERIMENTING WITH BFF FOR A PROGRESSIVE WEB APP

As Boerner explained, “when our native app team tried to replace the legacy
mobile API with their own BFF, they found it difficult to keep up-to-date with
all the test-and-learn experimentation going on in the web BFF. Ultimately, we
decided it would be too time consuming to create a custom front-end service for
each client and domain.”

That’s when team began to explore a graph approach with GraphQL and Apollo.


THE MOVE TO ONE GRAPH

With their BFF experience in hand, and the dual goals of moving the rest of the
website pages to the new PWA platform and aligning capabilities and experiences
between all client platforms, the team began to explore the use of GraphQL to
connect the entire organization’s app data and services into one central graph.
Their goal: a single graph, understood and discoverable by all teams, built to
empower a new set of cohesive customer experiences.

With a single entry point for clients to connect to, client teams were freed
from directly connecting to multiple services or managing communications across
multiple, extended teams. Meanwhile, service owners could easily expose their
data via a schema that allowed clients to retrieve exactly the portion of data
needed with a simple query.

AFTER ADOPTING A GRAPH: A FEDERATED SERVICES ARCHITECTURE TO SCALE

Expedia Group turned this effort into a formal initiative, which now serves as
the foundation of their new and modern application development stack, and
supports their strategy to create seamless customer experiences across all their
client platforms.

“When your client code doesn’t need to know which underlying service provides
the data, all kinds of good things start to happen, for both the client and
service teams,” said Boerner. “Client teams are freed from complexity and
service teams have a single contract to maintain, which frees them up to evolve
their back-ends faster and with less risk.”

Though given a broad charter, the team knew from the start that they needed an
iterative approach to building and operating this single graph. It needed to
have all the benefits of a single graph, but without requiring that a single
central team manage such a large schema. So, aligned with the “one graph,
federated implementation” architecture described at principledgraphql.com, Brand
Expedia group set out to distribute ownership of the graph.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Apollo Federation will allow us to implement our existing schema linking in a
safer, declarative manner, while opening up a whole new level of broader
federation opportunities across the wider enterprise”

Dan Boerner

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The first effort by the team was to develop a schema stitcher leveraging Apollo
Server called the “Loom,” which worked with their open-source graphql-kotlin to
stitch together GraphQL services for each domain schema into a single graph. The
Loom also allowed simple schema linking between common schema objects like
Geography. While this initial stitching implementation worked, the schema
linking required custom code for each link. When Apollo announced their Apollo
Federation, a new architecture for composing multiple GraphQL services into a
single graph, the team was immediately intrigued.

“Apollo Federation will allow us to implement our existing schema linking in a
safer, declarative manner, while opening up a whole new level of broader
federation opportunities across the wider enterprise,” explained Boerner.


MIGRATION TO APOLLO GRAPH MANAGEMENT

At scale, the team knew that expanding the graph across and within teams would
require powerful management capabilities to improve the development experience
and protect the graph.

“As our initial GraphQL rollouts began to show promise, the power of the
technical approach was clear. Equally clear was the need to have all the
powerful monitoring, management, and operational capabilities built into our
platform to support tens of teams and hundreds of developers,” said Boerner.
“When we learned about Apollo’s Data Graph Platform and the Apollo Graph
Manager, it became a classic build-vs.-buy decision for us. Apollo gave us the
tools we didn’t have, while allowing us to integrate with our existing
operational infrastructure.”

For Expedia Group, leveraging tools and tech from Apollo freed up the team for
other priorities. As Boerner put it, “If our small platform team had to build
all the tech we use from Apollo Platform, we’d have much less time to help
onboard new teams, evangelize our design principles, or ultimately solve our
customer problems.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Our new PWA clients have a tiny fraction of the business logic of our older
clients because we’ve moved it behind the graph where it’s shared by all
clients…”

Dan Boerner

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Apollo provided Expedia Group with a complete graph management solution, giving
them a means to monitor, detect, and prevent schema breaks, as well as
operationalize the graph—all at scale. It also makes a unified graph possible by
sharing management and portable code, queries, and fixes across teams.

Since adopting Apollo, code complexity has decreased dramatically. “Our new PWA
clients have a tiny fraction of the business logic of our older clients because
we’ve moved it behind the graph where it’s shared by all clients,” said Boerner.
“This also means that fixes made in the shared layer are picked up by all
clients, so that’s a big win in terms of reducing technical debt and fulfilling
our mission to create a seamless customer experience, regardless of the client
platform.”


DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE AND PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVES

Almost immediately after adopting the Apollo platform, Expedia Group saw an
improvement in the speed and efficiency of the developers working with the
single graph and GraphQL. Ben Munge, lead developer on Expedia Group’s Native
App iOS Team, saw how Apollo’s platform enabled developers to thread the graph
through tools they were already using.

“The power of the Apollo tooling to reduce developer effort and ensure that the
service code is always a true reflection of the schema made it a great option
for us,” he said. “Using generated code has greatly reduced the number of bugs
and minimized the development and testing effort compared to implementing this
integration manually. We develop our queries in Xcode using the Apollo GraphQL
plugin. We also leverage GraphQL Playgrounds to explore the schema and develop
queries. Once a query is set, we use the Apollo iOS tools to update our schema
and regenerate the API.”

Munge also uses the platform to track down issues and monitor the health of
services during debugging. “There were a lot of pluses to the Apollo platform,”
he added. “Speed was one of them. By partnering with Apollo, we can greatly
reduce the time to create new experiences and to resolve time-to-root-cause and
time-to-fix live issues.”


KEEPING THE GRAPH HEALTHY AND EFFICIENT

Expedia Group recognized the graph as an ideal central location to collaborate
across product teams, so they took the vital step of creating a new group to
create and manage their growing graph community. This became a key part of their
agile API strategy.

Using Apollo’s graph platform, developers across the organization can monitor
the health of the graph and discover how back-end services are used.

“We can take the graph metrics from Apollo and plug them into our operational
fabric, Grafana, Splunk, etc.” said Boerner. “But those tools are designed for
general purpose, and we find that Apollo’s dashboard gives a better 360-degree
GraphQL-native view of clients, operations, schema changes, and failures so that
our developers get a much clearer view of how our graph is performing. We also
see reductions in the time it takes to determine root cause during a service
disruption, as Apollo Graph Manager allows us to quickly see exactly which
clients and queries are affected.”

It also became important for managing changes to the underlying services and
schemas, so that any individual change from a team wouldn’t break existing
queries—or the customer experience.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Schema validation at PR commit is a game changer. We’ve already detected and
prevented a number of schema changes that would have led to weeklong service
outages for our native app customers.”

Dan Boerner

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Since customers run a variety of app versions, we have to ensure that even
older clients are still compatible with our graph,” said Boerner. “To protect
these clients, we use Apollo’s Github integration coupled with Schema Validation
to ensure backward compatibility at all times by validating all schema changes
against the client queries from the previous week of client requests.”

In the past, teams would make an API change on behalf of web clients and
inadvertently break native apps. As Boerner explained, “Schema validation at PR
commit is a game changer. We’ve already detected and prevented a number of
schema changes that would have led to weeklong service outages for our native
app customers. We modeled loss reductions from schema validation and were
surprised at how quickly the technology would pay for itself.”

It’s these types of central operations that ensure the data graph is a reliable
resource even as it evolves.


WHAT’S NEXT

“GraphQL is becoming the standard front-end API for all our customer-facing
applications, and teams are working on external partner APIs that leverage
GraphQL as we strive to leverage technologies that create consistency and
simplicity.”

Today, Expedia Group is expanding the use of the graph across more teams, which
is a great opportunity for everyone in the organization to think in terms of a
truly unified customer experience.

“As we work to leverage and share more capabilities across Expedia Group,
GraphQL and Federation are strategically important tools.” said Boerner.

GraphQL is also enabling opportunities to align across different product types.
“Across all lines of business, we are identifying the common capabilities that
allow a user to execute a search, browse and filter results, view details, and
make a purchase,” said Ben Munge, Senior iOS Software Engineer. “The service
architecture needs to be designed with this unified experience in mind. Why
should the response structure differ based the product we’re selling? Imagine if
Amazon had separate services for household goods, electronics, and books.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“We’re excited about the opportunities to connect our data graph with our
Unified Design System”

Tyler Fleck
Director of User Experience at Expedia Group

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Looking ahead, the core team is exploring advanced capabilities like
server-driven UI, powered by a graph that dynamically adjusts the user
experience across all clients based on machine learning models.

“We’re excited about the opportunities to connect our graph with our Unified
Design System to power a set of more scalable user experiences that allow
server-side experimentation,” said Tyler Fleck, Director of User Experience.
“Trying out new ideas across all our clients without the need to make any
client-specific changes speeds up the design and learning process, and
ultimately leads to better customer experiences and outcomes.”

What started as a bottom-up project with a small team focused on building a
proof-of-concept multi-tenant graph has grown both intentionally and organically
as teams throughout the company demonstrated the value of GraphQL and the Apollo
Platform. Expedia Group is now focused on building on the groundswell of
adoption across mobile web, iOS, and Android; onboarding service teams to
publish their capabilities to the graph; and demonstrating the value across the
company and across the customer experience. “GraphQL is helping us bring the
world within reach for millions of travelers,” said Boerner. We believe we are
just scratching the surface of what this transformation will unlock for our
customers.”





A travel platform to orchestrate the movement of people and the delivery of
travel experiences on both a local and global basis.

CHALLENGE

Legacy REST infrastructure isn’t suited for modern apps, leading to slow
development and inconsistencies across clients.

SOLUTION

Apollo Graph Platform to modernize the application architecture with GraphQL and
a single cross-brand graph.

RESULTS
 * Faster development of mobile and web products.
 * Faster resolution of time-to-root-cause and time-to-fix live issues.
 * Avoid weeklong outages caused by API changes impacting specific clients.
 * Less time to maintain consistency between platforms.


Questions?
Contact Us


SUGGESTED READING

Customer Story

The supergraph helps Booking.com boost developer productivity and ship 40%
faster

Founded in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com grew from a small Dutch start-up to
one of the...

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Event

How Expedia Increased Developer Velocity by 3x

Watch on-demand to learn how Expedia tackled their product velocity challenge
with a...

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E-books

Discover your path to a supergraph

Learn how experienced GraphQL champions have migrated their platforms from REST,
monoliths, and...

Read more

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