The GraphQL backend and microservices

Everything we've discussed so far about Relay is stuff that's in the browser. Relay needs to send it's GraphQL queries somewhere. For this, we need a GraphQL backend. This is pretty easy to implement, using Node.js and a handful of GraphQL libraries. We create what's called a schema, describing all the datatypes, queries, and mutations that will be used.

In the browser, Relay helps you scale your applications by reducing data-flow complexity. You have a means to declare what data is needed, without worrying about how it is fetched. It's the schema in the backend that actually needs to resolve this data.

This is another scaling problem that GraphQL helps address. Modern web applications are composed out of microservices. These are smaller, self-contained API endpoints that serve some particular purpose that's smaller than an entire app (hence the term micro). It's the job of our application to stitch together these microservices...