Five Years of Apollo Federation: the Standard for Enterprise API Platforms

The Apollo Federation, a standard for enterprise API platforms, has emerged as the industry consensus for composing APIs at scale. Organizations such as Netflix, Expedia, and Wayfair have adopted GraphQL federation to abstract API complexity, and its adoption is expected to rise with Gartner predicting that 30% of enterprises using GraphQL will use federation by 2027. Federation enables a platform strategy, providing centralized governance, team autonomy, composability, and adaptability to evolving requirements. Companies like Zillow, Square, Priceline.com, and Booking.com rely on Apollo Federation to power their API platforms, choosing it for its unified experience, modularity, and iterative approach. The technology has evolved over the years, with milestones including the publication of initial Federation code in 2019, more expressive graphs in 2020, Apollo Federation 2.0 in 2021, and Federated subscriptions in 2023. Apollo is working on a proposal for a common specification within the GraphQL Working Group to establish a standard for this technology category, which will unlock innovation and benefit the community.

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