Design Principles of Federated GraphQL

Martijn WalravenApollo, Software Engineer at Apollo

GraphQL was conceived as a unified access layer that empowers product teams by providing a common language for exposing and consuming data capabilities. These capabilities were typically implemented in a single schema through a resolver-based model. That poses challenges in environments with diverse microservices managed by various teams however, as found in most large organizations. Recognizing these challenges, we introduced Apollo Federation in 2019 to deliver on the promise of GraphQL within those environments. It respects existing service and team boundaries through a principled schema composition model that supports team collaboration and efficient, query plan-based execution across services. This has allowed GraphQL APIs to effectively scale to large numbers of services and teams. Given the success and common challenges observed, a working group comprising engineers from various organizations has been formed to establish a proposed open standard for federated GraphQL. This initiative aims to unify best practices and design principles. This talk will highlight the key discussions from this group and their implications for the evolving standard.