State of GraphQL Federation 2024

The State of GraphQL Federation 2024 is the most comprehensive report on GraphQL Federation, based on insights from over 1,000 developers, architects, and CTOs. Discover the latest trends, challenges, and future of GraphQL Federation

Why GraphQL Federation?

I had been assigned as a leader to solve company problems, which GraphQL was a solution for.

- ALEXANDER BANDARCHUK, Architect at eBay

If we look at the “Why” for Federation, we see a clear trend. It’s all about collaboration and enabling the organization to scale API development. To me, Federation is less solving a technical problem but rather an organizational one.

- JENS NEUSE, CEO, Co-Founder of WunderGraph

We wanted an org-level unified data access schema. Given that we have multiple sub-domains that work in silos, integrating them was a pain-point, hence we opted for Federation.

- SUBHASISH DHAL, Technical Architect at Dentsu

We wanted to implement a uniform API surface from existing legacy and some new services maintained by different teams with different API patterns.

- MAKSYM KOMARYCHEV, Principal Engineer at K Health

Scalability, speed, "flexibility and microservice architecture" were also highlighted as critical benefits of Federation.

- MASANORI UEHARA, Head of Platform at Tailor Inc.

We adopted GraphQL to rebuild our booking journey. We quickly realized we built a monolithic application, and we needed more teams with domain knowledge to start owning specific types and operations.

- STEPHEN WOTTEN, Senior Software Engineer at On The Beach

Federation Trends

GraphQL Federation adoption is well-established, with 72.34% of respondents reporting more than a year of experience.

WunderGraph Cosmo has become the dominant solution, with 87.23% of respondents currently using it, compared to 40.43% in 2023.

Apollo GraphOS usage has dropped significantly, from 57.45% in 2023 to 27.66% in 2024.

Around 17.02% of respondents reported using both Cosmo and GraphOS in 2024, indicating some teams are either transitioning between tools or using them complementarily.

2023

WunderGraph Cosmo

40.43%

Apollo GraphOS

57.45%

The Guild's Hive

2.13%

2024

WunderGraph Cosmo

87.23%

Apollo GraphOS

27.66%

The Guild's Hive

2.13%

Disclaimer: All respondents in this survey are WunderGraph Customers

Impact on Users

55%

55.32% of respondents reported improved customer experiences, highlighting how GraphQL enhances user satisfaction.

53%

53.19% of respondents cited faster feature delivery, showcasing its impact on team efficiency.

Future of Federation

By 2027, more than 60% of enterprises will use GraphQL in production, up from less than 30% in 2024.By 2027, 30% of enterprises using GraphQL will use GraphQL federation, up from less than 5% in 2024.Source: 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. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications.30% ENTERPRISES WILL ADOPT GRAPHQL FEDERATION BY 2027

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 of WunderGraph

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