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Tue, April 21BackEndArchitectureOpsTech
Tesco’s xAPI serves as the single entry point for all client interactions with the Retail Platform, powering web, mobile, in-store, and third-party experiences. Over time, this monolithic GraphQL API became a bottleneck, limiting scalability, capacity, and team autonomy. To address these constraints, Tesco evolved xAPI into a Federated GraphQL architecture, enabling independent subgraphs, dynamic schema composition, and domain-driven ownership. This session shares the practical journey from monolith to federation, including how the Strangler Pattern was applied for incremental migration, and how schema governance, observability, CI/CD pipelines, and multi-layer caching were implemented. The talk concludes with the measurable business and technical impact of federation at Tesco, including improved resilience and the convergence of store and online experiences under a unified API.
What You Will Learn
Why monolithic GraphQL APIs become bottlenecks at scale
How to apply the Strangler and Modular Monolith patterns to migrate safely to a federated architecture
The business and technical impact of GraphQL federation within a large retail platform
Who Should Attend
Backend developers
API engineers
Software architects
Platform and infrastructure engineers
Engineering leads responsible for API scalability and modernization
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Vishwas Chandrashekar is an SDE‑III at Tesco with over a decade of experience building and scaling high‑impact retail technology systems. He specialises in distributed APIs, modern web platforms, and GraphQL federation, with a proven track record of delivering complex, cross‑domain programmes end‑to‑end.
