Insights from the Community: State of Federation 2024

Last week, we released the first-ever State of Federation report—a deep dive into how teams across industries are adopting and evolving GraphQL Federation.

Get the Full Report Here

GraphQL Federation is now a proven strategy, and organizations from small startups to Fortune 500 enterprises are making the shift:

• 1.5M+ WunderGraph Cosmo downloads
• 10x growth in WunderGraph Cosmo Managed service users
• By 2027, 30% of enterprises using GraphQL will use GraphQL federation, up from less than 5% in 2024 [1].

This report is jam-packed with insights from our customers about how they are leveraging federation, tackling challenges, and shaping the future of API architecture.

As companies shift from monolithic to microservices architectures, APIs become increasingly fragmented and difficult to manage.

• K Health uses GraphQL Federation as an abstraction layer over microservices, creating a unified API surface to improve collaboration and simplify new service integration.

Cross-team dependencies delay feature releases, negatively impacting business growth.

• On The Beach adopted GraphQL Federation to delegate domain ownership (e.g., Flights, Hotels, and Transfers). This allows teams to iterate independently, reducing the delays that previously blocked feature rollouts.

Legacy systems must be modernized to meet the demands of a digital-first world, often leading to makeshift updates.

• SoundCloud uses GraphQL Federation as a facade over legacy services, enabling gradual modernization without a complete backend rewrite.

Emerging AI workloads and next-gen applications require real-time, unified data access.

• K Health leverages Federation to power real-time AI-driven diagnostics, enhancing response times and accuracy.

Seamless customer journeys demand faster, personalized, and data-driven experiences.

• By transitioning to Federation, SoundCloud has improved query efficiency by up to 45%. Optimizing query performance directly enhances the responsiveness of high-traffic views, such as track waveforms and comment counts, giving the user a smoother and more engaging experience.

“We can clearly see three focus areas in which GraphQL Federation users are going. Users want to implement more real-time use cases with Subscriptions and solutions like EDFS (Event Driven Federation Subscriptions). There’s big interest in performance optimizations through tools like Query Cost Analysis and directives like `@provides`. Security is a very important topic with persisted Queries, rate limiting and depth limiting being the next items on the checklist of platform teams.”

– Jens Neuse, CEO & Co-Founder at WunderGraph

What better way to highlight these areas than through real-world customer experiences?

• Real-Time Use Cases: On the Beach uses EDFS to power real-time pricing and availability updates across multiple travel providers.
• Performance Optimization: SoundCloud's migration to Cosmo reduced query latency by 45% and infrastructure costs by 86%, saving $265,000 annually.
• Security & Compliance: K Health adopted Federation to scale securely while maintaining strict HIPAA compliance.

The State of Federation 2024 is our inaugural report, and we’re excited to make this an annual tradition. Each year, we hope to expand our insights by surveying not just our customers, but the broader GraphQL community, providing a more comprehensive look at how Federation is evolving across the industry.

Interested in GraphQL Federation?
Let's connect and explore the most efficient approach for your team.

[1] Gartner, When to Use GraphQL to Accelerate API Delivery, Shameen Pillai, Tigran Egiazarov, et al., 7 March 2024. Available at: https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2H060YE8&ct=240319&st=sb.