Developers, engineers, and other technology experts are always looking for creative ways to build, manage, and deploy software. While the business needs and end goals of the products they build might differ, the underlying technologies, methods adopted, and best practices often work across industries.
Composable architecture is an example of a pattern that has greatly improved the developer experience. It has helped organizations build systems fast, reduce costs, innovate, and address other challenges associated with development.
In this guide, you will learn what composable architecture is and how it works; you’ll see how it can be designed and optimized to benefit your team.
What is Composable Architecture?
Composable architecture is a design paradigm that replaces large, monolithic platforms with agile and reusable components that can be combined to create a unified system. It involves breaking down systems or software into smaller, independent modules or components that are self-contained, developed, tested, and maintained.
The modular approach of composable architecture helps you avoid being vendor-locked or wrestling with a traditional all-in-one solution that might not cater to all your needs. Instead, it gives you the freedom to use just what you need whenever you need it, as composable architectures are all about choice.
The paradigm is particularly relevant in the following fields:
- Software engineering: Developers have adopted component-based libraries and frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular to build user interfaces from reusable software components. Another usage is in Microservice architecture, which lets you build applications as a collection of loosely coupled services that can be deployed independently.
- System engineering: Engineers use composable architecture to build industrial machines that are designed and configured from standard modules to meet specific needs.
- Product engineering: Popular products like smartphones and furniture are designed with components that are easily coupled, replaced, and customized.
What are the building blocks of composable architecture?
Before you start implementing composable architecture into a project or your organization, it's important to understand the key principles and components. These are the basic building blocks:
Modular design
A distinct principle of composable architecture is the use of loosely coupled components that exist as separate entities, each with specific business logic, which can communicate with each other through an Application Programming Interface(API). It’s like using lego blocks to build your applications.
For example, Vercel uses self-contained services to manage deployment, user authentication, core business logic, content delivery, observability, and more. These services form the basic building blocks of the overall Vercel system; they are responsible for a specific business capability and make it easy for the development teams to develop, test, and deploy changes quickly.
Application programming interfaces (APIs)
APIs are essential building blocks of composable architecture. They define the methods, data structures, and other interfaces that components or services use to communicate with each other. Examples of APIs include RESTful APIs,gRPC, and GraphQL.
Configuration management
When used as individual components or as a collection to build a system, components may require a set of guidelines or practices for managing them. This allows them to be customized, personalized, and adapted to different environments. Examples of this include the use of environment variables and configuration files.
Data management
An important part of composable architecture is having a system for storing and managing the data used by the components. SQL databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL, data warehouses like BigQuery, and NoSQL databases like MongoDB and Cassandra are examples of data storage solutions that help persist data and ensure data consistency across components.
Security
When setting up a composable architecture, it is essential to implement mechanisms to ensure that best practices are followed to protect components and services from threats, attacks, and unauthorized access. Examples of security measures in a composable architecture include API gateways, firewalls, and authentication and authorization mechanisms.
Versioning and dependency management
A crucial building block of composable architecture is setting up a versioning and dependency management system on the source code to ensure safe updates and rollbacks, thereby maintaining the compatibility and stability of the target system. NPM, Maven, and Nuget are examples of tools used for versioning and dependency management.
Benefits of composable architecture
Composable architecture addresses many of the common problems and shortcomings associated with traditional monolithic architecture when building systems and software. Here are some benefits of composable architecture:
Decoupling of monolith systems
A common pattern in traditional monolithic systems is that they are tightly coupled, large, and complex in implementation, making them difficult to manage, maintain, and scale. Changes made in one part of the system often have a ripple effect on the rest of the system.
With composable architecture, developers can break down the monolithic system into modular components that can be developed, tested, and deployed independently. This approach makes the system more robust, speeds up the development cycle, and reduces deployment costs. For example, developers can easily ship updates to the data processing module of an application without affecting the user authentication module or other parts of the application.
Flexibility with vendors
Unlike traditional architecture, which often leads to vendor lock-in, the composable approach supports the integration of best-in-class vendors for building components. This flexibility allows for the selection of the best technologies and reduces dependency on a single vendor, enhancing the ability to manage and improve digital experiences throughout the customer journey. For instance, a product manager can decide to use a primary payment provider and a secondary provider as a fail-safe option.
System flexibility and improved agility
With composable architecture, systems can be easily maintained and extended without disruption or downtime when adding new components or replacing and repurposing existing components. This approach enables organizations to be agile, reduce the time to market, and quickly address user requirements.
Reduced maintenance costs
Maintaining and updating large, complex systems is resource-intensive and costly, as making changes to a monolithic system requires significant time and effort. The composable architecture pattern, which involves breaking systems down into components, makes it easier to fix bugs and maintain the system without affecting the entire system. This approach reduces maintenance overhead and results in significant cost savings.
Continuous learning and innovation
In composable architecture, teams get to constantly learn and improve their knowledge because they have the flexibility to experiment with new technologies and approaches on a component-by-component basis without risking the entire system. This fosters innovation and improvement.
How to design and implement a composable architecture
A structured approach is required when designing and implementing a composable architecture to ensure the system's success in being modular, maintainable, and scalable. Here are are the steps to follow:
- Requirement gathering and project objectives: The first step in achieving a truly composable architecture is to clearly outline the business requirements, the scope of the project, key functionalities of the components, potential challenges that might arise, and strategies for mitigating them.
- Architect the system: Select an appropriate architectural pattern that will help break the system into self-contained modules and define the required APIs for communication between them.
- Choose the right technology stack: Carefully select the appropriate programming language, framework, and tools that best suit the defined requirements. Additionally, decide on the infrastructure that will support the deployment and updates of the system.
- Develop the component: Using the selected technology stack, develop each component as a standalone unit with its own lifecycle, exposing APIs for interaction with other components or systems.
- Implement security measures: Beyond development, ensure that the components are secure and follow best practices such as API gateways and authentication mechanisms. Additionally, use encryption for data transfer and set up an audit system to detect and respond to security incidents.
- Testing: Perform unit tests to verify the functionality of each component. Additionally, carry out integration tests and end-to-end tests to ensure seamless integration of components into the larger system.
- Deploy and monitor: Establish a deployment mechanism like a version control system, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), and other cloud services to automate the build, testing, and deployment of components. Additionally, set up a monitoring system to collect and analyze metrics, which will help you understand system behavior and user interactions.
- Maintain and iterate: Building a composable architecture is not a one-time process. Components need to be updated and improved based on user feedback and requirement changes.
While the steps above outline a possible approach you can follow when building a composable architecture, it's crucial to follow these best practices during implementation.
- Ensure each component or module has a single responsibility.
- Avoid hardcoding dependencies; use configuration files to enhance flexibility and reusability.
- Keep code organization and code reuse in mind when building the components.
- Automate testing, deployment, and monitoring processes to minimize human errors and enhance efficiency.
- Prioritize security throughout the development lifecycle.
- Standardize communication protocols and interfaces between components to prevent issues during updates or new integrations.
- Keep documentation, guides, and important documents up to date.
- Utilize agile methodology to iterate quickly and incorporate feedback loops.
Tools and techniques used for enhancing and managing composable architecture
To truly make a system composable, developers, business architects, and other technology stakeholders leverage a variety of tools and techniques to handle complexity and ensure scalability. Here are some tools and techniques to consider:
Containerization and orchestration mechanisms
Tools like Docker for containerization and Kubernetes for orchestration simplify the deployment process. They ensure the system works as intended in any environment, while being scalable and secure.
Continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD)
Developers can use CI/CD to streamline the building, testing, and deploying of independent components and systems. Tools like Jenkins and CircleCI, along with CI/CD best practices, help ensure the success of a composable system.
Version control and dependency management
Version control systems like Git and dependency management tools like NPM help developers track changes, facilitate collaboration, and manage dependencies to ensure the composable system remains stable and compatible.
Monitoring and observability
Logs, metrics, and traces provide crucial insights into the performance of the composable architecture and help identify performance bottlenecks. Tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Kibana are used for this purpose.
Configuration management
Configuration files, such as YAML, JSON, and BASH scripts or tools like Ansible and Chef, manage component configuration settings and ensure consistency across the composable system.
Packaged business capabilities (PBCs)
Packaged business capabilities are modular and self-contained units that cover a specific business process or function. They play a crucial role in enabling organizations to build composable systems. PBCs include all the necessary data models, business logic, and APIs required to perform their functions and integrate with other PBCs to build software systems. This modular approach is essential for building software systems that are flexible, scalable, and easy to maintain.
The required tools and approaches for building composable architecture can vary based on customer needs and business objectives. Let’s look at a sample use case to see how combining some of these tools can achieve business requirements.
Going deeper: A sample retail shop business use case
Background
Aviva store, a retail merchant dealing in makeup, hair, and skincare products, reached out to you for help migrating its legacy monolith e-commerce solution to a fast, new composable enterprise architecture. They also want to process payments, manage subscriptions, and handle localization.
With this knowledge in mind, the project involves back-end development tasks like authentication, data management, payment processing, and caching, as well as front-end development tasks like API integration, localization, and script integration for monitoring and deployment.
Technology stack
With the business requirements and scope sorted out, we can map out the necessary tools to achieve the desired results as detailed below:
- Next.js: For building the application with built-in support for internationalized (i18n) routing.
- TailwindCSS: For styling the front-end.
- NextAuth.js: For authentication and authorization.
- Stripe: For processing payments, managing subscriptions, and handling recurring payments.
- Prismic (Headless CMS): For managing content and data in the application.
- Postmark: For managing emails.
- Tinybird: For monitoring and analytics
- Vercel: For deployment.
The scope and technologies listed above will make Aviva Store a fast, secure, robust, and scalable e-commerce application, capable of supporting payment processing, data management, subscription management, and localization.Also important is the fact that Aviva isn’t locked into any of these solutions and can swap them for more innovative solutions anytime.
Wrapping up
In summary, composable architecture gives organizations the flexibility to move away from rigid legacy systems, enabling them to build robust applications. It allows you to adapt business processes quickly to market changes and meet customer needs.
If you're at a crossroads about whether to adopt composable architecture in your software application or are unsure how to get started, Monogram has a dedicated team to cater to your needs and support you every step of the way. Use the contact form to get started.
You can also check out some of our selected case studies to learn more about our approach and how we collaborate with teams.