When REST and GraphQL is worth the effort

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. REST and GraphQL is not free, and pretending otherwise leads to bad decisions.

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

When it is worth it

REST is simpler to cache and easier to reason about. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

When it is not

If nothing downstream depends on it and nobody is complaining, it can wait. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

How to decide

The right answer depends on your clients, not on fashion. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

The short version

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Three things worth confirming about REST and GraphQL before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• GraphQL shines when clients need wildly different shapes of data — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.