In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses need to be more agile, flexible and responsive than ever. Although technology has become mature enough to guarantee continuous innovation, the truth of the matter is that monolithic architecture and legacy systems are still hindering business agility.
While the modernization of legacy systems is fundamental to overcome some limitations, the right architectural pattern plays a pivotal role when it comes to flexibility, scalability, and faster time-to-market. Indeed, a Composable Architecture approach may represent a feasible way to achieve this by construing systems from interchangeable building blocks.
In this article, we will outline the primary features and benefits of Composable Architecture, as well as the challenges associated with its implementation and how to address them.
Composable Architecture: Modules-like building
Composable Architecture involves the implementation of business applications via the composition of existing or newly built services.
This approach moves away from large, complex and monolithic systems and prioritises modular, flexible, independent components, i.e. self-contained application building blocks that represent business capabilities. Adding new modules or updating existing ones can be as easy as pie without compromising the whole system. Moreover, obsolete features or components can always be removed at will if necessary. APIs also do play an important role in this approach by providing the necessary architectural foundation to drive speed of innovation and scale.
The building blocks that shape and define Composable Architecture are referred to as Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs). PBCs are enclosed, reusable, self-consistent software components that represent a well-defined business capability recognizable as such by a business user. They are therefore assembled modules that provide a complete business function. In essence, PBCs are designed to be business-centric and provide a higher level of abstraction than individual microservices. Since PBCs can be considered as a bundle of services, documentation and metadata, APIs, Event Topics, and UI components, they are programmatically accessible and are ready to be delivered to users.
Finally, PBCs can be developed internally within the organization, purchased from third‑party vendors, or can even be open‑source.
Features of Composable Architecture
Composable Architecture is a transformative paradigm that’s redefining how organizations build and deploy applications. At its core, Composability involves breaking down monolithic systems into self-contained units of functionality. A composable design system, which is a pluggable array of modular components, depicts a scenario that finds fertile ground for cloud-native technologies like Platforms, that enable new business approaches through savvy usage of PBCs and, as a part of them, microservices.
A cloud-native environment is essential to take full advantage of cloud computing capabilities that ensure more stability and easier access to services. Composable architecture, unlike monolithic architecture where the user interface and data access are tightly coupled, enables independent development and deployment of individual services without impacting the overall application.
In cloud-native composable architectures, APIs are the essential glue, enabling PBCs to connect seamlessly with microservices. This interoperability, a hallmark of cloud platforms, allows for dynamic service orchestration and easy integration with external partners, driving agility and scalability. Leveraging cloud-native tools, organizations can automate deployment and management of these composable elements, ensuring rapid iteration and continuous delivery. This approach empowers businesses to quickly adapt to market changes, building and rebuilding capabilities as needed within a resilient, cloud-powered ecosystem.
Benefits of Composable Architecture
Composable Architecture brings in a number of benefits in terms of business agility. Gartner’s research indicates that by 2027, 30% of enterprises will utilize data ecosystems enhanced with data fabric elements to support composable application architecture. This will provide them with a significant competitive advantage.
Furthermore, the increased investment in integration technologies and APIs are laying the groundwork for composable architecture, as shown by 67% of respondents to the 2024 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey. This architecture promotes application composability, allowing fusion teams to reuse existing capabilities, reduce redundancies, and enhance agility.
Some advantages of Composable Architecture are:
- Velocity: Ensuring faster time-to-market and consistency in execution;
- Adaptability: Enabling agility and responsiveness to change;
- Efficiency: Optimizing operations and resource utilization with practical reusability;
- Flexibility: Evolving PBCs without affecting the entire system;
- Synergy: Improving productivity and communication;
- Reliability: Increasing efficiency and resiliency.
By decomposing applications into independent services, organizations gain the flexibility to scale, update, and replace individual components without disrupting the entire system. Hence, Composable Architecture fosters a “plug-and-play” environment, enabling businesses to rapidly assemble and reassemble functionalities to meet evolving customer needs. This agility translates to faster innovation cycles and a reduced time-to-market, critical advantages in today’s competitive landscape.
Challenges of Composable Architecture
While Composable Architecture offers several benefits such as agility, modularity, reusability, and swift development to the software lifecycle, it also presents significant challenges and pitfalls that organizations must address to ensure successful implementation.
Among the most disruptive ones:
- Complexity and Overload: A complex portal with many integrations and catalog entries can undermine developer experience (DevX) improvements if it forces developers to deal with portal complexity irrelevant to their daily work. Developers can be overwhelmed by the excess of potential software development architectures, patterns, processes, practices, tools, languages, frameworks, and platforms. Therefore, orchestration, standardization, and good documentation must be considered as early as during the design phase.
- Integration Difficulties: Organizations may face integration challenges and complexities when solutions are composed of disparate elements that lack a shared architectural foundation;
- Data Governance: Difficulties in managing the costs and required effort of data integration into data products;
- Security Concerns: Since the whole system highly depends on a multitude of different components, each with a unique vulnerability and security threat, addressing issues like trust, explainability, privacy, and bias is essential;
- Need for a Marketplace: First and third party PBCs are featured on a Service Catalog, but this becomes an additional asset to manage and maintain.
However, a robust, dynamic platform simplifies the orchestration of diverse components. A well-designed platform provides centralized governance, streamlined API management, and automated deployment, mitigating risks associated with fragmented systems.
By abstracting the underlying infrastructure, a platform could allow organizations to focus on building business capabilities rather than managing intricate integrations, ultimately accelerating time-to-value and reducing operational overhead.
Moreover, careful planning, technology and skills investment, and cultural change are key to overcoming the so-called “composable regret”. Organizations can achieve greater business agility and maximize the benefits of composable architecture but they first need to build digital maturity in order to avoid failure.
Conclusion
The rapidly changing digital landscape requires an adaptable architectural approach. A composable business architecture, built on interchangeable modules, enhances business agility. Key benefits are realized through orchestration, which leverages the modularity, independence, scalability, reusability, and flexibility of the architecture. Additionally, composability promotes team autonomy, simplifies legacy modernization, and streamlines testing.
In this scenario, Internal Developer Platforms are the enabling technologies for a new business approach through composable architectures. Mia-Platform, the first AI-Native Developer Platform Foundation, has a significant function in empowering a dynamic composable architecture by providing all the necessary tools – including a catalog – for managing and orchestrating services like PBCs, microservices, and APIs.
Composable Architecture is just one aspect of a larger goal, and it doesn’t exist in isolation. The ability to design modular, flexible, and reconfigurable systems allows organizations to quickly adapt to market changes, customer demands, and technological advancements. This ability also defines a business as a Composable Digital Business or Composable Enterprise.
