Federation
Federation is a software architecture pattern that enables multiple independent systems or services to operate together as a unified whole while maintaining their autonomy. It is commonly used in distributed systems, databases, and APIs to allow disparate components to share data and functionality without centralizing control. This approach supports scalability, fault isolation, and organizational alignment by letting teams manage their own services.
Developers should learn federation when building large-scale, distributed applications where different teams or services need to collaborate without tight coupling. It is particularly useful in microservices architectures, federated databases for data integration, and GraphQL APIs to combine multiple schemas into a single endpoint. By using federation, developers can improve system resilience, enable incremental updates, and support diverse data sources or business domains.