This article was originally published on The New Stack.
Both software development architectures have pros and cons. Here’s how to decide whether a composable or microservices architecture will work best for you.
Monolithic architectures have been the cornerstone of software development for decades. Despite their simplicity and ease of development, these traditional architectures often encounter performance bottlenecks and scalability challenges as applications gain complexity. Microservices soon emerged as a solution by offering performance optimization, flexibility and fault tolerance. A lesson to learn from industry giants such as Atlassian‘s and Netflix’s successful migration from monolithic technologies is that speed, agility and scalability win in today’s marketplace.
Composable architecture has emerged as a complementary approach to align tech stacks with the evolving needs of software development. This design approach is generating a lot of buzz within the tech industry, and in 2021, Gartner predicted that companies adopting a composable approach will be able to implement new features 80% faster than competitors.
Although composable architecture can enhance a business’s agility, scalability and adaptability, many IT and DevOps teams wonder what this could mean for microservices. They’re asking about the relationship between these approaches, their similarities and differences, and whether composable architecture might make microservices obsolete.
Composable Architecture: The Rise of Modular Systems
Composable architecture is a modular approach to software design and development that builds flexible, reusable and adaptable software architecture. It entails breaking down extensive, monolithic platforms into small, specialized, reusable and independent components. This architectural pattern comprises a pluggable array of modular components, such as microservices, packaged business capability (PBC), headless architecture and API-first development that can be seamlessly replaced, assembled and configured to align with business requirements.
In a composable application, each component is developed independently using the technologies best suited to the application’s functions and purpose. This enables businesses to build customized solutions that can swiftly adapt to business needs.
Since this architectural pattern is based on API-first principles, information is shared between services and systems without needing to know the underlying technology. This approach offers a range of benefits, including:
- It helps teams scale up easily and quickly while capitalizing on growth to gain a competitive edge.
- It makes maintenance and system updates easier since modular components can be modified and replaced individually, reducing cognitive load.
- It speeds the development process by allowing teams to reuse and repurpose existing components to meet changing needs and requirements.
- It allows new APIs and tools to be added to support growth without worrying if they work well together.
- It enables organizations to keep up with business trends on digital channels while delivering a consistent experience that improves customer satisfaction.
The composable approach has gained significant popularity in e-commerce applications and web development for enhancing the digital experience for developers, customers and retailers, with industry leaders like Shopify and Amazon taking advantage of its benefits.
Microservices: A Proven Approach Still Holding Strong
Microservices architecture is still leveraged for developing, deploying and scaling streamlined modular software solutions that are reusable by other applications. It comprises a collection of smaller independent components or services, each responsible for a specific business functionality.
Microservices are a significant departure from traditional monolithic architectures, where the user interface and backend are usually tightly coupled and designed to work as a single functionality. Microservices architecture is a decentralized approach that allows teams to develop, maintain and continuously improve individual services without interrupting the entire application. These technologies often utilize APIs to expose information externally for seamless integration with external services, applications and systems.
A microservices architecture is well-suited for complex systems with multiple functional components, and many big tech companies including eBay, X (formerly known as Twitter) and Netflix have migrated their legacy monolithic applications into small, independent, specialized applications. In 2023, Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey reported that 49% of developers are working with microservices at their organization.
Microservices offer tangible benefits for software development organizations such as:
- Enhancing fault isolation and ensuring that the failure of a single module has minimal impact on larger applications.
- Offering the flexibility to add, replace or remove individual microservices as required while experimenting with new technology stacks.
- Enabling teams to adopt small and frequent releases, automating development, testing and release processes using CI/CD.
- Isolating software components to facilitate performance and health monitoring.
However, like every emerging technology, working with microservices has drawbacks. The multitude of independent services introduces complexities and can make managing each service daunting. DevOps and operations teams are also likely to run into distributed tracing challenges. Communication between multiple services also creates operational overhead, complicating the system’s design.
How Composable and Microservices Architectures Relate
A composable design system is a microservices approach to software development that allows individual components to be combined and reconfigured to meet specific requirements in system development. Composable architectures often encompass a wider range of components and potentially larger services than microservices architectures. On the other hand, microservices can be employed with APIs to create composable technologies. In this way, microservices can be a specific implementation of composable architectures. Microservices most often focus on small, specific business capabilities, whereas composable architectures are broader.
Both involve interchangeable and reusable components to enhance flexibility and adaptability. Moreover, both encourage using technology-agnostic components to enable development teams to work autonomously.
Winner? Composable Architecture or Microservices
Choosing which approach is best for your use case requires many considerations. Both offer distinct benefits and are essential to modern technology design and development, but both also have challenges.
Composable architecture brings agility, modularity, reusability and swift development to the software life cycle but also introduces several issues. This dynamic and flexible approach makes monitoring, predicting and verifying interactions between components difficult. As the number of components increases, it becomes necessary to not focus too heavily on the integration but maintain sight of the ultimate purpose of the architecture. Composable architecture can also pose challenges from a security standpoint, as each component may have different security requirements and vulnerabilities. Organizations must consider these issues beginning in the design phase, and implement systems to mitigate them as challenges arise.
The same is true for the microservices approach. Although it is considered an excellent choice for teams working with distributed systems and managing independent services, microservices also present complexities. However, it’s usually easier to mitigate and resolve these complexities since the components are smaller.
Before you choose an approach, it’s essential to understand its impact. Consider how it will affect product development and deployment, adaptability to market changes and business outcomes. Also, think about its role in delivering exceptional customer expectations needed to succeed in the market.
The Future of Architecture in a Multi-Paradigm Landscape
As application architectures continuously evolve, businesses seek methods, concepts and technologies that best drive business flexibility and agility. Gartner predicted that 70% of large and midsize organizations will soon consider composability a key success criterion and that the composable approach may speed the implementation of new features by 80%, potentially reducing time to market. This suggests that composable architecture will play a significant role in the future of enterprise software architecture.
Composable commerce, digital experience platforms (DXP) and customer data platforms can empower innovation, democratize development, improve governance and deliver continuous value.
Note that composable architecture does not signify the end of microservices since microservices are an essential component of composable technologies. Also, as microservices and other component-based architectures become more common, composable architecture will continue evolving.
Wrapping Up
There is no one-size-fits-all software architecture. When choosing, consider how each approach’s benefits, capabilities and challenges will affect your business goals.
Composability is a powerful architectural design pattern transforming how we approach application development. Its modular nature promises scalability, reliability and agile application development that reduces time to market, offers operational independence, enables cost savings, improves customer experience and saves time.
Likewise, the microservice approach breaks down complex systems into smaller, specialized services representing distinct business functionalities. It introduces faster innovation, high scalability, improved resiliency, continuous delivery and failure isolation to the software development life cycle.
For a deeper understanding of composable architecture and how to transform your business into a composable enterprise, dive into our composable enterprise white paper.
