The Apollo Router is a high-performance Federation runtime written in Rust, now available in open preview. It offers improved performance compared to the latest release of Apollo Gateway, with benchmarks showing it is 10x faster and has higher throughput. The preview release adds support for more advanced configuration and customization options, including simple YAML configuration and native Rust plugins. Apollo Router also provides key integrations with Apollo Studio, such as automated supergraph rollout and operation-usage reporting. It can be deployed as a standalone binary, making it easier to manage and scale. Users can start deploying Apollo Router by following three easy steps: downloading the binary, ensuring their project has a supergraph schema, and running the router. The Apollo Router is designed to make extensibility more approachable, with plugins that can be configured using a `router.yaml` file without requiring Rust code. It also supports lightweight Rhai scripting for programmatic customizations when YAML configuration is insufficient.