Platform engineering continues to be a prominent theme in the CNCF's KubeCon Europe 2024 conference, with a focus on API developer experience. Leading organizations like Netflix and Adobe are leveraging GraphQL and Apollo Federation to streamline API management and accelerate application delivery. Federated GraphQL serves as a powerful composition layer within an API platform, providing several benefits that align with the principles of cloud-native architecture. Its ability to enable flexible architecture, seamless developer experience, cost optimization, improved performance, along with a thriving open-source community, makes GraphQL a crucial layer of the API platform. The adoption of federated GraphQL is driven by its ability to improve developer velocity, security and standardization, making it an attractive solution for organizations seeking to optimize their API strategies.