GraphQLConf 2025

The Member Experience Core Systems team at Netflix is entrusted with orchestrating every facet of the member experience. From the intricacies of the profiles screen to the dynamic homepage and the seamless search for your favorite shows, our robust API layer is the backbone that supports it all.

Operating at an astronomical scale, our two principal Subgraph Services collectively manage over a million GraphQL queries per second. This immense scale, coupled with the diverse queries our systems accommodate, ensures that even the most minute edge cases are brought to light.

In this presentation, we will delve into two significant production bugs that emerged at scale. The first involved a federation-based solution at the query planning layer, which culminated in a 20% reduction in requests per second and yielded substantial cost savings amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The second, a subgraph service specific enhancement, remarkably doubled the efficiency of our entire fleet.

By sharing our journey of identifying and resolving these issues, we aspire to provide insights that will directly enhance your day-to-day endeavors using GraphQL.