cosmo VS wundergraph

At the very beginning, I was a solo founder and put my project WunderGraph (https://github.com/wundergraph/cosmo) on GitHub.

After a while, a CTO contacted me and asked if I could "support" his team and add some features that he wanted. After a month of sweating, we agreed that they'd pay me a monthly support subscription of $2k.

I learned a lot from the use cases, improved the software, and got some more users, which ultimately was enough of a story for VCs to raise a $3M seed round, which I think is quite cool as a first-time founder from Germany with zero connections, no YC friends, etc...

I quickly realized that I could not pull this off alone, so I teamed up with 3 fantastic Co-Founders who are responsible for the business side, marketing, sales, and engineering.

Fast forward two years and we're growing our customer base at a great pace and are slowly looking towards a Series A. I can tell though that the way from our first customer to where we are now was extremely tough. We're in enterprise sales, we had to switch our strategy at some point. Lots of learning, lots of pain.

In retrospect, I wouldn't say that the first customer is the hardest. Building a repeatable sales motion is much harder. Building a product, marketing, and sales process that all aligns well for repeatable sales is a lot of work.

Whoever tries this, good luck and please connect if you need help as a founder or want some advice. I love to help others to start their own business. It's hard, but it's also a life that I don't want to miss.

👉 Cosmo on GitHub: The code

By leveraging the astjson package, we were able to speed up our GraphQL API Gateway (Cosmo Router) while reducing the memory footprint. At the macro level, we were able to increase requests per second by 23% and reduced p99 latency by 44% over the previous version of Cosmo Router. At the micro level, we reduced the memory usage of a benchmark by 60%.

To learn more, go check out their docs here. Also, the WunderGraph Discord can be found here, if you have questions or issues you want to discuss.

For the future, we're working hard on adding compatibility with Federation 2.x features, If you find any bugs or have feature requests, please open an issue on GitHub.

If you want to learn more about Cosmo, check out the documentation.

I never really got graphql until I stumbled upon Wundergraph. (https://github.com/wundergraph/wundergraph). I have no affiliation with them except that I have been building an app with it. I'm honestly puzzled how it's not more popular. Maybe people are solving these problems in other ways? But I tried out a bunch of stuff: Vapor, Supabase, Hasura, etc. None of it simplifies building complex systems the way WG does.

I think their takes on graphql make sense: https://wundergraph.com/blog/graphql_is_not_meant_to_be_expo...

To demonstrate field usage metrics in Federation, I’ll be using WunderGraph Cosmo — a fully open source, fully self-hostable platform for Federation V1/V2 that is a drop in replacement for Apollo GraphOS.

The inverse is also true. As a technical founder, and maybe even an introvert like me, you should definitely look for a non-technical co-founder who can help you with networking, etc... I found my dream co-founder through YC Co-founder match and what can I say, it's going great. We're focusing on enterprise GraphQL/API solutions (https://wundergraph.com) and I benefit from the networking and communication abilities of Stefan, while I answer all technical questions. Tldr, I highly recommend to team up with people who complement your skills.

GraphQL Gateway is primarily responsible for serving GraphQL queries to consumers. It takes a query from a client, breaks it into smaller sub-queries, and executes that plan by proxying calls to the appropriate downstream subgraphs. When we started our journey, there was only Apollo Federation in the arena, and we used it. Still, now you can look at other options (e.g. Mercurius, Conductor, Hot Chocolate, Wundergraph, Hasura Remote Schemas), compare benchmarks and decide what's important and preferable for your needs. The Gateway provides a unified API for consumers while giving backend engineers flexibility and service isolation.

I'm a big fan of tRPC. It's amazing how it pushed TypeScript only stacks to the limit in terms of DX. Additionally, it made the GraphQL community aware of the limitations and tradeoffs of the Query language. At the same time, I think tRPC went through a really fast hype cycle and it doesn't look like we're seeing a massive move away from REST and GraphQL to RPC. That said, we see a lot of interest in RPC these days as we've adopted some ideas from tRPC and the old NextJS. In our BFF framework (https://wundergraph.com/) we've combined file based routing with RPC. In addition to tRPC, we're automatically generating a JSON Schema for each operation and an OpenAPI spec for the whole set of operations. People quite like this approach because you can easily share a set of RPC endpoints as an OpenAPI spec or postman collection. In addition, there are no discussions around HTTP verbs and such, there's only really queries, mutations and subscriptions. I'm curious what other people's experiences are with GraphQL, REST and RPC style APIs? What are you using these days and how many people/teams are involved/using your apis?

You can check out the source code on GitHub and leave a star if you like it. Follow me on Twitter, or join the discussion on our Discord server.

If you like the work we're doing and want to support us, give us a star on GitHub.