Platform Engineering Podcast GraphQL, MCP, and the Future of APIs with Apollo CEO Matt DeBergalis
**UPDATE** - Apollo GraphQL has kindly offered us a few free passes to join them at the GraphQL Summit in San Francisco, October 6-8, 2025. If you are interested in going, the code is: PodcastSummit25
What if your API layer could help you ship faster today and make tomorrow’s AI workflows safer and easier to build?
Apollo CEO Matt DeBergalis explains how GraphQL became a practical standard for unifying messy backends, why declarative schemas and strong types are the “bedrock” for agentic systems, and where MCP fits when you want agents to call business data safely. You’ll hear real examples of speeding up frontends, tightening observability, and running focused personalization without “fat” APIs.
What you’ll learn:
- A plain-language model for GraphQL and why it decouples frontend needs from backend services
- How typing, schema docs, and field-level telemetry reduce risk and enable LLM-driven tooling
- Practical ways to expose queries as MCP tools and start with internal “agentic DevOps”
- Tactics for experiments and personalization that stay fast and measurable at scale
- Why an end-to-end approach (client and server) matters for reliability and speed
Guest: Matt DeBergalis, CEO and Co-Founder of Apollo GraphQL
Matt DeBergalis is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Apollo GraphQL, focused on bringing the popular GraphQL technology to the enterprise. He previously served as Apollo's CTO, leading product and engineering. Matt's longtime focus has been in open source and platforms: he co-founded Meteor.js, which grew to become one of the most popular open-source projects in the world for developing full-stack web apps with JavaScript, as well as ActBlue, the American political fundraising platform that revolutionized grassroots political giving. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family. In his spare time, Matt enjoys taking to the air and flying his 1966 Beechcraft Baron.
Links to interesting things from this episode: