Limelight Announces General Availability of GraphQL Caching and Serverless Hosting for Builders of Headless Websites

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Dec. 14, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Limelight Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: LLNW), a leading provider of content delivery services and AppOps at the edge, today announced general availability of GraphQL functionality for its Layer0 by Limelight web application CDN.

GraphQL is an important enabler of microservices-based (aka headless) websites, allowing web builders to make their API layer much faster and easier to manage. Layer0 has solved the key challenge of caching GraphQL APIs at the network edge, which is not supported by traditional web CDNs. In addition, the solution supports hosting the GraphQL server in a serverless environment. These new capabilities enhance Limelight's presence in the $4.4 billion web application CDN market, especially as web builders, not the operations team, are driving these purchase decisions.

The GraphQL query language improves on traditional REST APIs and has had tremendous growth and adoption among developers. Originally incubated at Facebook and later open sourced, GraphQL reduces the over-fetching of data, which can improve performance. It also enables teams to iterate their APIs faster without incurring versioning headaches by defining a flexible but strongly typed API between client and server. This has made GraphQL popular with developers, especially enterprise organizations using headless or API-first web architectures. In the annual state of JS survey¹, GraphQL had the highest scores for awareness (98%), satisfaction (94%), and interest (87%) among developers than any other data layer solution.

Unfortunately, traditional CDNs and caching software have been built around REST APIs and are incompatible with GraphQL because they don't cache the more complex HTTP POST format. As a result, websites using traditional web CDNs experience poor performance because GraphQL queries cannot be parsed and cached by these CDNs.

Layer0 solves this problem by adding GraphQL parsing and support for the POST method to EdgeJS, a high-performance, JavaScript-based declarative language for edge logic. With EdgeJS, web builders can create powerful custom caching logic based on both the properties of their GraphQL queries and HTTP headers such as cookies and authentication. For example, a developer can cache information such as a product ID in an ecommerce API from a GraphQL response, as well as attributes such as language, currency, and personalization preferences that are embedded in the request headers. In addition, the same application can manage and submit runtime calls to the GraphQL server hosted in a serverless environment on Layer0, eliminating worries about infrastructure and scale. 

"We're proud to leapfrog the industry by delivering native GraphQL support," said Ajay Kapur, Chief Technology Officer at Limelight. "Web builders ship up to twice as often because Layer0 makes edge compute and caching one small part of a more holistic 'application centric' workflow. Business teams love their Layer0-powered site because they load in literally the blink of an eye via predictive prefetching, the industry's fastest edge compute, and suite of RUM and observability tools."

Layer0 includes everything development and DevOps teams need to implement a headless or Jamstack architecture including hosting, serverless, observability, RUM and CI/CD integration. Teams can be flexible in how they leverage Layer0. They can use it to cache their GraphQL APIs, run their GraphQL server in a serverless environment, or host their entire headless application. Layer0 also has powerful routing options that enable teams to gradually migrate legacy applications to headless or API-first architectures.

The combination of GraphQL support and compatibility with traditional systems makes Layer0 ideal for large enterprises migrating to GraphQL with a mix of legacy and modern components.

About Limelight
Limelight (NASDAQ: LLNW) is an industry leader in providing edge-enabled solutions to deliver fast, secure digital experiences on a global scale.  We offer powerful tools that optimize, protect and deliver our clients' valuable digital assets in an increasingly competitive marketplace. From content delivery and AppOps to Jamstack application architecture and web security, we are uniquely positioned to leverage our global private network and client-obsessed experts to help our customers win. The world's largest brands trust Limelight and we invite you to learn more about us by visiting www.limelight.com, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

¹ https://2020.stateofjs.com/en-US/technologies/datalayer/

SOURCE Limelight Networks