Apollo GraphQL Announces New VP of Engineering, New Enterprise Security and Governance Capabilities

By AIT News Desk On Jan 28, 2021

New VP of Engineering Josh McKenzie looks to add velocity to the enterprise solution set, grow the engineering team, and expand on massive open source adoption of GraphQL

Apollo GraphQL, the pioneer in the use of open source GraphQL API technologies for modern application development, announced it has expanded its engineering team with the appointment of Josh McKenzie, who has been named Vice President of Engineering. In addition, Apollo announced a set of new enterprise security and collaboration capabilities in Apollo Studio to help organizations secure and scale their data graph across teams.

“I am incredibly excited to join Apollo and partner with its amazing leadership and technical teams to increase the already massive adoption of GraphQL, which is widely seen as the obvious future of APIs”

As VP of Engineering, McKenzie will bring valuable experience to Apollo as the company continues to expand its engineering team and grow its enterprise solution set to match the rapid open source adoption of GraphQL. With experience in scaling organizations from dozens to hundreds of engineers, McKenzie joins Apollo with a strong background in enterprise and open source software. He was most recently VP of Engineering at DataStax, leading the company’s engineering team. He is also a committer and member of the Apache Cassandra Project Management Committee. Prior to DataStax, McKenzie served as a technical team lead at Morningstar, spent several years building teams at a proprietary High Frequency Trading firm and at IBM working on network security. Across his career, McKenzie has amassed extensive experience overseeing teams dedicated to meeting the demands of the world’s most impactful organizations.

“I am incredibly excited to join Apollo and partner with its amazing leadership and technical teams to increase the already massive adoption of GraphQL, which is widely seen as the obvious future of APIs,” said McKenzie. “It’s becoming more and more clear that adaptable, expressive APIs on top of the stack are what allows developers to move at the speed required to win.”

“Josh’s experience and leadership in open source and enterprise technology makes him the perfect fit to lead Apollo’s engineering team,” said Matt DeBergalis, co-founder and CTO at Apollo GraphQL. “We are at an inflection point with GraphQL: It’s been validated as a solution that the world has a massive appetite for, and Josh will help ensure that Apollo can match that appetite and meet the market demand already out there–while continuing to grow it.”

Apollo is also pleased to announce the availability of features that support enterprises’ need to balance security and governance with speed and flexibility.

New enterprise-class graph access controls in Apollo Studio strengthen security and governance by providing granular control, based on roles, over who can view and change specific graphs. Leveraging roles that directly mirror the roles of their users, organizations can control access at the user and graph level, as well as limit who can change production variants and assign API keys

The new access controls allow the most innovative companies in the world to deliver their graph platform securely and at scale without compromising the developer productivity gains GraphQL provides.

Also new in Apollo Studio Enterprise is Webhooks – a powerful integration feature that enables teams to configure programmatic notifications to be sent when their schemas change. Enterprise customers will be able to configure Webhooks to send notifications–in the form of standard HTTP requests–when a schema change occurs on one of their deployed graphs tracked in Apollo Studio. Webhooks can be used to capture changes in an external changelog, send custom messages, automate deployment workflows, and trigger custom workflows.

The addition of webhooks to Apollo Studio is a natural extension to the schema registry and enables enterprise customers to build powerful custom workflows and integrations into their schema management lifecycle powered by Apollo.

Customers using Apollo Studio Enterprise can start using the new access controls and webhooks today.