• Introducing Viaduct, Airbnb’s data-oriented service mesh By: Raymie Stata, Arun Vijayvergiya, Adam Miskiewicz At Hasura’s Enterprise GraphQL Conf on October 22, we presented Viaduct, what we’re calling a data-oriented service mesh that we believe will bring a step function improvement in the modularity of our microservices-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). • In this blog post, we describe the philosophy behind Viaduct and provide a rough sketch of how it works. • Please watch the presentation for a more detailed look. • Massive SOA Dependency Graphs For a while, S ervice- O riented A rchitectures have been moving towards ever larger numbers of small microservices. • Modern applications can consist of thousands to tens of thousands of microservices connected in unconstrained ways. • As a result, it’s not uncommon to see dependency graphs like the following: This particular dependency graph happens to be from Airbnb, but it’s not uncommon.
Article Summaries:
- Airbnb unveiled Viaduct, a data‑oriented service mesh designed to tame the complexity of large microservice architectures. Presented at Hasura’s Enterprise GraphQL Conference, Viaduct replaces traditional procedure‑centric service meshes (e.g., Istio, Linkerd) with a GraphQL‑based framework that organizes services around data rather than remote procedure calls. The team argues that modern SOAs, with thousands of interdependent services, become “spaghetti‑like” and hard to maintain. By defining the mesh through a GraphQL schema, Viaduct aims to improve modularity and reduce tangled dependency graphs, promising a step‑function boost in SOA maintainability.
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