GraphQL Federation vs. Composition

This page is a stub. The full specification reference is maintained by the GraphQL Foundation.

The distinction

Apollo Federation is a concrete implementation of a distributed GraphQL architecture. Individual services (subgraphs) expose partial schemas, and a gateway or router composes them into a unified supergraph schema that clients query as one endpoint.

GraphQL Composition is the formal specification-level process of merging multiple schemas into one. The GraphQL Composite Schemas Spec defines the rules by which types, fields, and directives from separate schemas are merged and validated.

Relevance to this project

json-schema-x-graphql generates subgraph-ready SDL from JSON Schema. The generated SDL:

• Uses x-graphql-federation extensions to annotate entity types with @key
• Marks entity fields with @external, @requires, and @provides as directed by the JSON Schema source
• Is compatible with both Apollo Federation v1 and v2 gateways

See the Federation recipe for a practical example of annotating JSON Schema for federation output.

Further reading

• GraphQL Composite Schemas Spec (draft)
• Apollo Federation Docs
• ADR 0005: React + Rust + WASM Stack