Frequently Asked Questions

Product Information & Content Federation

What is Content Federation in Hygraph?

Content Federation in Hygraph is the ability to unify content from multiple sources into a single API, simplifying content management and delivery. It allows you to source external data directly from your Hygraph content API, reducing architectural complexity and eliminating redundant data copies. [Source]

How does Content Federation work in Hygraph?

Content Federation works by integrating data sources using Remote Sources and Remote Fields. You can connect both RESTful and GraphQL APIs as Remote Sources, configure custom headers, and combine content from remote systems with Hygraph content in a single API. This enables querying and joining data across multiple sources with a single GraphQL query. [Source]

What are Remote Sources and Remote Fields in Hygraph?

Remote Sources are systems or products that hold content to be combined with Hygraph content into a single API. Remote Fields allow you to wire requests to external services and combine related content from different sources on the fly. Both RESTful and GraphQL APIs are supported as Remote Sources, and you can configure custom headers for requests. [Source]

How easy is it to set up Content Federation in Hygraph?

Setting up Content Federation is straightforward and can be done through Hygraph's low-code interface. After connecting a Remote Source, you can add Remote Fields to your schema and start querying content from remote systems within minutes. [Source]

Is Content Federation available on all Hygraph plans?

Yes, Remote Sources for Content Federation are available in all Hygraph plans, including the Community Tier. [Source]

Features & Capabilities

What features does Hygraph offer?

Hygraph offers a GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and a wide range of integrations. Key features include a powerful GraphQL API, support for RESTful and GraphQL Remote Sources, configurable TTL caching, SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption, and sandbox environments. [Source]

What integrations are available with Hygraph?

Hygraph integrates with platforms such as Netlify, Vercel, BigCommerce, commercetools, Shopify, Lokalise, Crowdin, EasyTranslate, Smartling, Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot, Ninetailed, AltText.ai, Adminix, and Plasmic. [Source]

Does Hygraph provide an API?

Yes, Hygraph provides a powerful GraphQL API for efficient content fetching and management. [Source]

How does Hygraph optimize content delivery performance?

Hygraph is optimized for rapid content delivery, which improves user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. Its architecture ensures fast content distribution and responsiveness, reducing bounce rates and increasing conversions. [Source]

Pricing & Plans

What is Hygraph's pricing model?

Hygraph offers a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans. For more details, visit the pricing page.

Security & Compliance

What security and compliance certifications does Hygraph have?

Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 Compliant, ISO 27001 Certified, and GDPR compliant. These certifications ensure high levels of data protection and security. [Source]

What security features does Hygraph provide?

Hygraph provides enterprise-grade security features such as SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments to protect sensitive data and meet regulatory standards. [Source]

Use Cases & Benefits

Who can benefit from using Hygraph?

Hygraph is ideal for developers, IT decision-makers, content creators, project/program managers, agencies, solution partners, and technology partners. It is especially beneficial for modern software companies, enterprises modernizing their tech stack, and brands scaling across geographies or re-platforming from traditional solutions. [Source]

What business impact can customers expect from using Hygraph?

Customers can expect significant time savings, streamlined workflows, faster speed-to-market, and enhanced customer experience through consistent and scalable content delivery. These benefits help businesses modernize their tech stack and achieve operational efficiency. [Source]

What industries use Hygraph?

Hygraph is used across industries such as food and beverage, consumer electronics, automotive, healthcare, travel and hospitality, media and publishing, eCommerce, SaaS, marketplace, education technology, and wellness and fitness. [Source]

Can you share some customer success stories with Hygraph?

Yes. Komax achieved a 3X faster time to market, Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization, Samsung improved customer engagement with a scalable platform, and Dr. Oetker enhanced their digital experience using MACH architecture. More stories are available here.

How long does it take to implement Hygraph?

Hygraph is designed for quick implementation. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months from the initial touchpoint. Customers can get started quickly by signing up for a free account and using resources like the Hygraph Documentation and onboarding guides. [Source]

Pain Points & Solutions

What problems does Hygraph solve?

Hygraph addresses operational pains (like reliance on developers for content updates, outdated tech stacks, and clunky content creation), financial pains (high operational costs, slow speed-to-market, expensive maintenance, scalability challenges), and technical pains (boilerplate code, overwhelming queries, evolving schemas, cache problems, and OpenID integration challenges). [Source]

How does Hygraph solve pain points for different personas?

For developers, Hygraph reduces boilerplate code and streamlines query management. For content creators and project managers, it provides an intuitive interface for independent content updates. For business stakeholders, it lowers operational costs, accelerates speed-to-market, and supports scalability. [Source]

What KPIs and metrics are associated with the pain points Hygraph solves?

Key KPIs include time saved on content updates, system uptime, consistency in content across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, time to market, maintenance costs, and scalability metrics. [Source]

Support & Implementation

What support is available to Hygraph customers?

Hygraph offers 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users have access to detailed documentation, video tutorials, and a community Slack channel. [Source]

What training and resources are available for getting started with Hygraph?

Hygraph provides onboarding sessions for enterprise customers, video tutorials, documentation, webinars, and Customer Success Managers to guide users through adoption and implementation. [Source]

How does Hygraph handle maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting?

Hygraph provides 24/7 support for maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance, and all users can access detailed documentation and the community Slack channel. [Source]

Customer Proof & Recognition

Who are some of Hygraph's customers?

Hygraph is trusted by companies such as Sennheiser, Holidaycheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. [Source]

What feedback have customers given about Hygraph's ease of use?

Customers have praised Hygraph for its ease of use and intuitive interface, noting that it is 'super easy to set up and use' and that 'even non-technical users can start using it right away.' The interface is described as logical and user-friendly. [Source]

Technical Documentation & Resources

Where can I find Hygraph's technical documentation?

Comprehensive technical documentation for Hygraph is available at https://hygraph.com/docs.

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Introducing Content Federation

One content API, unifying your entire stack. Content Federation allows you to source external data directly from your Hygraph content API.
Gijs Hendrix

Written by Gijs 

Jul 12, 2022
Hygraph content federation

Today, we mark a new milestone at Hygraph, as we transform the idea of the API-based CMS. Aside from being frontend agnostic, we’re thrilled to announce that Hygraph can now push the boundaries and capabilities of what a Headless Content Platform is even further, by being backend-agnostic.

Connect any web service and API to your Hygraph content model to query and join data across multiple sources with a single GraphQL query.

Having spoken to hundreds of our users and customers, and understanding their pains of managing a stack to power highly-demanding composable architectures, this direction seemed to be the missing piece in what a true Content API should provide.

Michael Lukaszczyk, Co-Founder and CEO

You are now able to unify all mission-critical components of your stack into a single API, while reducing the complexity of your architecture, removing redundant copies of your data and getting rid of the middleware code that glues your services together. With this, development efforts and overhead for your connected digital experiences will significantly decrease.

Furthermore, it unlocks immense potential for businesses to modernize their legacy code and tech stacks, by letting them harmoniously work together rather than being overhauled or "hacked". Unifying and enriching your content programmatically, and delivering them across devices from a single endpoint allows organizations to meet business goals by having their services work for them, and not against them.

We call it Content Federation.

#Key Takeaways:

  • With Content Federation, you can unify your stack into a single API, reduce the complexity of your architecture, remove redundant copies of your data and get rid of expensive custom middleware code that glues your services together.
  • Remote Sources are the entry point for accessing remote content & data through the Hygraph GraphQL API, allowing you to create a single content endpoint without having to migrate everything to a single platform
  • Requests to external services can be wired to content stored in Hygraph using Remote Fields, allowing you to also pass in values as arguments such as product IDs. This way you can easily combine related content from different sources on the fly.
  • We support both RESTful and GraphQL APIs as Remote Sources, and provide a configurable TTL caching layer on top for optimal performance.

#A short recap into the history of CMS

Starting in the ’90s, web content management systems entered the software landscape to help people collaborate on the intersection between website and content creation. The dominant players from that era, such as Drupal, WordPress, AEM, or Sitecore, still hold massive market shares in the web ecosystem. Today, they are often referred to as “CMS monoliths”.

But with the exploding diversification in the device ecosystem, businesses faced new challenges on how to serve content to channels beyond the browser. Seeking a way to solve those challenges, the category of headless content management systems got invented, allowing developers to integrate the content into any platform or frontend framework of choice, using an API.

In addition to this, the increasing complexity of working with monolithic software systems is propelling engineering teams to adopt microservice & MACH architectures, and to embrace a best-of-breed approach in systems design.

However, after taming the exploding fragmentation of devices, software architects are now facing a new fragmentation of third party services and microservices when composing backends for products that are bringing value to their customers. This composition process is usually complex and time-consuming, requiring developers to write glue code often referred to as middleware.

Today, we are excited to announce an addition to Hygraph that helps businesses mitigate, simplify, and in some cases, remove this extensive step in their software development process, making sense of the fragmentation of the frontend and backend landscape. One content API, unifying your entire stack.

Content Federation - Inline@2x.png

#Introducing Remote Sources

To make Content Federation a reality, we’re introducing the concept of Remote Sources. A Remote Source is a system or product that holds content that should be combined with content in Hygraph into a single API.

Configuring a Remote Source can be done very easily through our simple to use low-code interface. We support both RESTful and GraphQL APIs, and allow developers to configure custom headers on requests to the remote source. An example use case for this would be providing an Authorization header.

add-remote-source.gif

After connecting a Remote Source, you can now add Remote Fields to your schema to combine content from the remote system with content in Hygraph. And that is all there is to it! Within minutes, you can query content from your Remote Source through the easy to use GraphQL API that Hygraph provides.

#Get Started With Content Federation

Remote Sources are available in all Hygraph plans, including on the Community Tier. Detailed documentation can be found here or reach out to us to get a consultation on how remote fields can drastically decrease the complexity of your stack.

Blog Author

Gijs Hendrix

Gijs Hendrix

Gijs is the Head of Product at Hygraph. When he's not focused on realizing our product vision, he spends time teaching others how to pronounce his first name.

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