API / Apollo Gateway Interview questions
What is managed federation?
Managed federation is Apollo's approach where subgraph schemas are registered with GraphOS rather than the gateway or router polling each subgraph directly and composing locally on its own.
When a team publishes a new subgraph schema with Rover, GraphOS validates it, runs composition centrally, and — if composition succeeds — pushes the freshly composed supergraph schema out to every running gateway or router instance, typically within seconds and without requiring a restart.
This gives teams a central point of governance and history for schema changes, plus the ability to run schema checks against real production traffic before a change ever ships, which local, unmanaged composition doesn't provide on its own.
In managed federation, where does the authoritative composed supergraph schema get produced?
What is one practical benefit of managed federation over local, unmanaged composition?
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