Composable Architecture: The Key to Building Scalable Websites

Businesses need a scalable and flexible approach to build secure, agile, and high-performing software infrastructures. In this evolving competitive landscape, this approach empowers them with improved customer satisfaction, adaptability to market trends, and increased profits.

Ergo, employing a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) or framework that enables you to streamline digital transformation initiatives and adapt to evolving business requirements is imperative.

And this is where composable architecture – a modular approach to system design – comes into play.

Composable architecture is identified as a top technology trend. In fact, Gartner predicts that businesses utilizing a composable approach will outdo their competition by 80%.

With composable architecture as part of the web development strategy, your business can –

• Embrace technological advancements

• Drive innovation

• Deliver value to customers,

and more.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the key components, benefits, and leading use cases of composable architecture. We’ll also understand how incorporating it into your Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) can create transformative user experiences and boost ROI.

What is Composable Architecture?

Composable architecture is an architectural pattern or design approach that promotes building software systems by composing smaller, reusable components. It emphasizes the construction of systems from independent, self-contained parts that can be combined and composed to create larger and more complex systems.

It can be classified as follows:

1. Swift Composable Architecture is specific to the Swift programming language and is primarily used for building iOS, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch apps. It provides a set of protocols and tools, known as The Composable Architecture (TCA), that support composable design patterns. TCA includes features like testing, state management, and modular code that enable you to facilitate the composition of features in Swift applications.

2. React Composable Architecture is based on the React JavaScript library, which is widely used for building user interfaces in web applications. This composable architecture enables you to incorporate functional programming concepts, such as immutability, pure functions, and unidirectional data flow, to build predictable and maintainable React applications. It encourages breaking down the application into smaller components that can be composed together to create the overall user interface.

Therefore, with composable architecture your business can achieve speed, agility, better leadership, and greater resilience. This further enables you to witness a cost-effective and productive website or application.

Key Principles of Composable Architecture

Composable architecture is guided by several core principles that shape its design and implementation. These include:

• Orchestration: It involves coordinating and managing individual components or services to achieve harmonious collaboration.

• Modularity: It focuses on breaking down systems into smaller, self-contained modules that can be developed and maintained independently, promoting reusability and adaptability.

• Discovery: It allows for dynamic identification and integration of components, enabling seamless composition.

• Autonomy: It emphasizes the independence and self-governance of components, enabling them to evolve or be replaced without disrupting the entire system.

MACH: The Building Blocks of Composable Architecture

MACH is an acronym that stands for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. These characteristics are considered beneficial for developing modern, flexible, and scalable software architectures (including those that embrace composable principles). Let’s briefly explore each characteristic:

1. Microservices: Composable architecture often aligns with the microservices approach, where systems are decomposed into smaller, loosely coupled services that can be developed and deployed independently. This modularization facilitates composability and agility.

2. API-First: Composable architecture emphasizes the design and development of APIs as the primary means of communication between components. APIs enable the composition of different services and modules, allowing them to work together seamlessly.

3. Cloud-Native: Composable architectures can leverage cloud-native principles, such as scalability, elasticity, and resilience. Cloud-native technologies and platforms provide an infrastructure that supports the dynamic composition and deployment of services.

4. Headless: Composable architectures often embrace a headless approach, decoupling the front-end presentation layer from the underlying back-end services. This enables flexibility and allows different front-end technologies or channels to consume and interact with the composable services.

Success Stories: Building Innovative Web Solutions With Composable Architecture

Here are two success stories that depict how leading businesses leveraged composable architecture to provide rich and personalized digital experiences.

1. Shopify: By adopting the composable architecture approach to build its e-Commerce web development platform, Shopify achieved remarkable success.

• They broke down their system into independent and reusable components, achieving modularity and scalability. This allowed them to quickly iterate on their platform, add new features, and adapt to changing market demands.

• They also leveraged cloud-native technologies and API-first design principles to enable seamless integration and composition of services.

• The flexibility and agility of composable architecture allowed their developers to work on smaller/focused components, enabling parallel development and faster time-to-market.

• This also provided flexibility for merchants to customize their online stores by choosing from a range of available components and services.

2. Netflix: By adopting a microservices-based approach, Netflix achieved remarkable scalability and flexibility.

• The modular nature of the composable architecture allowed Netflix to independently develop, update, and deploy services, leading to faster feature implementation and an improved user experience.

• Leveraging cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes, Netflix dynamically composed and managed its microservices, ensuring seamless scalability and efficient resource utilization.

• The composable architecture played a significant role in Netflix’s ability to handle massive user demand and rapidly adapt to evolving market trends. Also, it enabled Netflix to maintain its position as a leading global streaming service provider.

Reshape Your Digital Experiences With Composable Architecture

Businesses deliver transformative digital experiences through the adoption of composable architecture. By leveraging composable architecture principles, you can create adept Digital Experience Platforms or applications. These enable the seamless integration of best-in-breed tools and microservices, providing the flexibility to adapt and evolve. Not just this, it enables rapid development and deployment, empowering marketing and IT teams to deliver rich, up-to-date content experiences.

Additionally, with streamlined workflows and reduced development time, you can innovate and stay ahead of the competition. So, utilize composable architecture to build DXPs or applications that increase ROI, analyze customer data, and enable continuous optimization. Thereby, ensuring exceptional digital experiences that meet customer expectations.

Frequently Asked Questions on Composable Architecture

Ques 1: What are the building blocks of composable commerce?
Ans: The building blocks of composable architecture include modular components, services, and APIs that can be independently developed, deployed, and managed. It relies on a microservices’ architecture, event-driven design, and containerization to ensure scalability, flexibility, and resilience, enabling businesses to rapidly adapt and innovate by reusing and recombining these components.

Ques 2: What is the difference between composable architecture and microservices?
Ans: Composable architecture emphasizes modularity, enabling systems to be assembled from interchangeable components for flexibility and rapid innovation. Microservices architecture is a subset, focusing on creating small, independent services that communicate over a network to form a complete application. It emphasizes decoupling and scalability within composable systems.

Ques 3: What is an example of composable architecture?
Ans: An example of composable architecture can be an eCommerce platform where various functions, such as product catalog, inventory management, payment processing, and customer service are developed as separate, modular services. These services can be independently updated, scaled, or replaced, ensuring flexible adaptation to changing business needs without disrupting the entire system.

Ques 4: What is the difference between modular and composable architecture?
Ans: Modular architecture focuses on dividing a system into separate, interchangeable modules with defined functionalities, enhancing maintainability and scalability. Composable architecture takes this further by enabling the dynamic assembly and reassembly of these modules (and services) at runtime, providing greater flexibility and agility in adapting to changing business requirements and technologies.

Ques 5: What are composable architecture applications?
Ans: Composable architecture applications are dynamic systems built from interchangeable, independent components that can be assembled, reassembled, and scaled according to specific business needs. This approach is applied in various domains, including eCommerce platforms, digital banking, content management systems, and enterprise software, enabling rapid innovation and adaptation to market changes.

Ques 6: What are the benefits of composable infrastructure?
Ans: Composable infrastructure provides flexibility by enabling IT resources to be dynamically reconfigured and reallocated based on workload needs. It also enhances efficiency, reduces operational costs, and accelerates deployment times. By treating hardware like software, it supports rapid innovation and adaptability to changing business requirements, optimizing resource utilization and performance.

Leverage Composable Architecture to Deliver Superlative Digital Experiences. Talk to Us!