Does graphql-sse work well in a serverless environment ?

[LouisAmon]

Hello :)

I saw this video recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZtTut7QsZ8) and I was wondering why he mentions that SSE isn't good for production and that Redis would be a better Pub/Sub transport ?

In this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlFPm47NQa0) he demonstrates using Redis as a PubSub with GraphQL Yoga but then notes at the end that using a serverless environment would mess with that

I was initially interested in using GraphQL Yoga using either AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers or Vercel Functions (or even in a SvelteKit project hosted on Vercel)

Has anybody actually tried running SSE-based subscriptions on these hosting platforms ?

[enisdenjo]

graphql-sse itself is completely server agnostic and as such can run in any JavaScript environment - including all that you have mentioned. However, I personally have no experience in this segment so I cannot give you a subjective answer.

Redis is not a transport though, Redis is an in-memory database - it cannot be used as a user-facing transport. Users subscribing to a server over internet can either use SSEs or WebSockets (or some other proprietary transport for IoTs). I reckon that he is talking about Redis as an internal pub/sub mechanism for publishing subscriptions to servers, which then publish those to users (either over SSEs or WSs).

I guess what he means by Redis being a tad more complex in serverless environments is because you have to keep a persisted connection to Redis in order to get notified; whereas, serverless environments are usually short-lived lambda functions.

[LouisAmon]

I'm considering switching from a Python GraphQL Framework to GraphQL Yoga, mainly because of the SSE and because deploying websockets at scale is... tedious

I don't really see how SSE would be a game changer in that regard, and I was hoping that someone from the community would have some answers or feedbacks :)

[enisdenjo]

Using GraphQL Yoga is an absolute recommend if you ask me. For the current state of GraphQL over Internet (including realtime) consider reading the GraphQL over Internet blogpost. I think the SSE vs WS comparison table can help you decide.

You can also ask directly on GraphQL Yoga's repository about any doubts you might have about it!