Building Composite Architectures

Recently after Gartner in its recent report highlighted “Composite Architecture” or “Composable Architecture” as one of the five emerging trends in modern innovation and technology for the next 10 years. I started coming across this topic in various technical forums.

“Composability” as such is not a new topic, as we have used this frequently in object-oriented programming to achieve Polymorphism. In software architecture terms it is defined as the combination of software systems to produce a new system. In other words, it is directly connected to the goal of agility and reusability and the whole crux of it is to respond to the changing business spectrum.

Domain-Driven Design to build Composable Application

If we take a step back and go back to the way a simple application created using domain-driven design using an onion architecture. The orchestration layer plays a pivotal role in making an application composable by interacting directly with the repository or service layers.

The orchestration layer as such can either be a WebHooks API, a Data importer, API Controller, Messaging service, or a simple REST or SOAP request.

This kind of atomic structure if done properly can result in designing a system that is open to change its external integration seamlessly and also meet the changing business landscape.

Atomic Architecture

If we take the earlier example and apply it in a larger context, the below visualization depicts a circular relationship between different layers in a typical business domain.

Here the applications are interconnected in an atomic way making the organization landscape plug-in and plug-out systems in an easier way. With the advent of the native SaaS-based platforms, this type of “Composable architecture” is getting more and more noticeable.

Elements of Composable Architecture

The basic building blocks of a composable system is still around the foundation of Containerization, Microservices, Cloud, API’s, headless architecture, etc.

Conclusion

With a Composable mindset, organizations can uplift isolated business operating models and move towards a more practical loosely coupled technology landscape where systems can be plugged in and out flexibly.

This kind of model perfectly fits with organizations adopting agile ways of working or building modern omnichannel integrations with different types of native Cloud-based SaaS platforms.

This model can also be applied to bridge gaps across the entire ecosystem of legacy and modern applications including areas of a unified experience, operations, transformations, infrastructure, external and internal system integrations.