In 2018, less than a year into its existence, software firm Hasura decided to open source open source Open Source Denoting software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. its proprietary product. The company went ahead and hosted all of its software source code on the developer platform GitHub GitHub The Ken The Indian spice in GitHub’s recipe for enterprise success Read more . Suddenly, individuals and organisations all over the world could download, use, and repurpose the company’s software without paying a cent.
Counterintuitive as this may seem, Tanmai Gopal, co-founder and chief executive (CEO) of Hasura, tells The Ken that it was “fairly obvious that this was the thing to do.” When they started out in July 2017, Gopal and Rajoshi Ghosh, the company’s chief operating officer (COO) and co-founder, were in the middle of a worldwide data explosion data explosion Statista Volume of data/information created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide from 2010 to 2025 Read more . Companies were no longer just generating data about their users buying an item online or driving their car from A to B. There was also metadata metadata Metadata Metadata means 'data about data'. It is defined as the data providing information about one or more aspects of the data. For example. Means of creation of the data, Purpose of the data, Process used to create the data. being generated to better understand these user behaviours.
This influx of data created an opportunity for anyone able to facilitate easy access to these large datasets for developers. Such interventions are mission critical for data-heavy businesses, which need to run hundreds of thousands of such operations every second to operate smoothly.
Enter, Hasura. “We wanted to create the layer of technology between these two entities [data and developers], so they can be as productive as possible,” says Gopal.
To achieve this goal, Hasura built GraphQL GraphQL GraphQL GraphQL is a query language and server-side runtime for application programming interfaces (APIs) that prioritizes giving clients exactly the data they request and no more. APIs APIs Application Programming Interfaces , which easily translate data requests from the frontend to any database at the backend.
