We live in uncertain times.
Volatility in terms of market, business, and customer needs has become a constant to contend with.
Covid19, the crisis in Ukraine, and the rapid advance of technological progress force us to ask a question: how do we design for a future that changes everyday?
One answer is Composable Architecture or Composable Business.
This article by our CTO Mario Stefanutti discusses the importance of composability and how to use composable architecture to help organizations transform and keep pace with change.
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Composable Business, a new enterprise-wide approach that will help you in building an IT architecture that fears nothing.
How many different ways of storing information have been invented in the recent past? In addition to classical relational databases (and there are already hundreds of these), we have columnar, object-oriented, graph, knowledge base, probabilistic DBs, key-value DBs, hybrids, and many others with other specificities. The same goes for messaging systems, frameworks for building web applications, service containers, and all areas of IT, bar none. And the pace of these evolutions and changes is growing rapidly.
Among these frameworks or products some are revolutionary, become mature quickly, and in fact, change the IT landscape deeply. Many others, fortunately (most, I would say), die just as quickly.
But why this pace, this increase? On what does it depend?
Two factors are important, and these feed off each other:
Business is becoming increasingly demanding and inventive: new start-ups, as technologies evolve, invent new ways to create value for society and do business. And this frenzy dictates increasingly rapid technological changes. The technological changes and the continuous interconnection between humans and technology cause an increase in the amount of data generated, collected and analyzed. This leads to the development of new technologies and techniques to store, manage and analyze data, such as big data and data science. IoT is a practical example of this. New technical possibilities then lead to new business possibilities.
It becomes extremely critical for companies to know well how the IT technology ecosystem evolves, in such a dynamic market. On this knowledge and the choices that are made, neither can depend the life or death of an idea, on which a start-up or company invests time and resources.
In this blog, we will talk about composable architectures and how this architectural model can help you live well with all these changes.
Gartner predicts that by 2023 organizations that have adopted a composable approach will be able to deploy new capabilities 80% faster than competitors who have used an ad-hoc solution. And 80% faster is no small feat. 80%!
I must admit that, since nothing else is being talked about on the Internet, I tried to ask some questions about composable architectures to OpenAI ChatGPT, to see what it answered. I now report the answers here. Of course, a lot of information and the definition of composable architectures can be found on many other technology sites: IBM, Gartner, Oracle, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others.
I will now leave the floor to OpenAI ChatGPT, then of course I will continue with more personal remarks on the topic.
| What is composable architecture? Composable architecture is a design approach for building complex systems from smaller, independent components that can be easily combined and configured to create a desired functionality. This approach allows for flexibility and adaptability in the design of the system, and makes it possible to easily add, remove, or modify individual components without affecting the overall functionality of the system. The goal of composable architecture is to enable the rapid development and deployment of complex systems by making it easier to build and maintain them over time. Which are the characteristics of composable architecture? Answer in Italian, please Un'architettura composabile è quella che consente la creazione di sistemi complessi a partire da componenti più piccoli e indipendenti. Alcune delle principali caratteristiche di una architettura composabile includono modularità, flessibilità, scalabilità e riutilizzabilità. In una architettura composabile, ogni blocco di costruzione o componente può essere utilizzato e combinato con altri componenti in modi diversi per creare una varietà di sistemi diversi. Ciò consente maggiore flessibilità e adattabilità, nonché una maggiore facilità di manutenzione e aggiornamenti. Inoltre, una architettura composabile può facilitare l'incorporazione di nuove tecnologie e approcci, nonché la possibilità di scalare verso l'alto o verso il basso per soddisfare le esigenze in continuo cambiamento. Which frameworks can help to build it? There are many different frameworks that can be used to build composable architecture. Some common examples include microservice architecture, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and event-driven architecture. These frameworks provide a set of standardized ways to design, build, and deploy the individual components of a composable system, and make it easier to integrate them into a cohesive whole. Other tools that can be useful for building composable architecture include service discovery and routing mechanisms, message brokers, and API gateways. These tools can help to manage the interactions between the different components of the system, and enable them to work together seamlessly. What is it important to consider in composable architecture? Answer in Italian Quando si progetta un'architettura composibile, ci sono alcuni fattori importanti da considerare. Questi includono:Modularità: In un'architettura composibile, i singoli componenti o servizi dovrebbero essere progettati il più modularmente possibile, in modo da poter essere facilmente combinati e riutilizzati in modi diversi per creare nuove funzionalità.Interoperabilità: I diversi componenti di un'architettura composibile dovrebbero essere progettati in modo da poter comunicare e interagire in modo perfetto, in modo da poter essere facilmente combinati e integrati l'uno con l'altro.Flessibilità: Un'architettura composibile dovrebbe essere progettata in modo altamente flessibile, in modo da poter essere facilmente modificata o aggiornata senza influire sull'intero sistema.Riutilizzabilità: I componenti di un'architettura composibile dovrebbero essere progettati in modo da essere facilmente riutilizzabili, in modo da poter essere utilizzati in contesti e applicazioni diverse.Scalabilità: Un'architettura composibile dovrebbe essere progettata in modo da essere scalabile, in modo da poter essere facilmente estesa o adattata per supportare nuove funzionalità o carichi di lavoro maggiori. By considering these factors, it is possible to create a composable architecture that is modular, flexible, and scalable and can support the development of a wide range of applications and services. |
Well, the level of conversation quality of OpenAI ChatGPT is impressive, but that is another story.
We will now resume the article, but still, keep in mind OpenAI ChatGPT's answers to the questions above.
The concept of composable architecture, technically speaking, is not new. Forcing our hand a bit, we can send it far back in time. Modularity, flexibility, scalability, and reusability (ChatGPT's second answer) have always been present in system design, and the goal even then was to protect the business, to evolve it more easily.
I remember that in the 1990s, there were already many methods and tools for making good composable architectures. CORBA (1991), despite all the problems and criticisms made in the past, was born precisely for this purpose. Tibco, BEA's Tuxedo, later acquired by Oracle, already made it possible to implement architectures with a good level of modularity, but they were still proprietary solutions and still one could not talk about composability. Then, right at the end of the century (December 1999), J2EE was born, and not long after that SOA-oriented architectures. SOA is one of the methods for making composable architectures (ChatGPT's third answer). It was technically more complex to make composable architectures, but from another point of view, the number of technology choices available was much less, which made life a little easier for architects and programmers. There were 4 or 5 DBs, not hundreds like today, and the same was true for messaging systems, in which you could choose from 2-3 different systems and not dozens if not hundreds like now.
The thing that changes over time is the awareness of the concept of composable architecture and the quality and consistency of the theoretical edifice that has been built and that represents the foundation of composable architectures, and the ecosystem of products/frameworks created to realize composable architecture. So many embryonic concepts invented long ago have evolved to converge into a core of concepts that now fully allow one to speak of composable architecture.
On the one hand, there has been the evolution of many technical aspects: microservices, the emergence of headless products, the concepts of API first, cloud-native, service mesh architectures, and many others.
On the other, there are business aspects, which require C-level figures (CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, etc.) to consider the choices on composable architectures as fundamental to the good growth of their business, protecting it from the dynamics of IT changes. It encompasses many aspects, including strategic business attitude, set of technologies, and processes that enable organizations to innovate and adapt to changing business needs.
The issues of interchangeable building blocks have been taken to a much higher level than before. Here are some examples of the needs in this area:
Much more dynamic evolutionary needs, where responsiveness time to change is critical. This is a complex but glorious time for enterprise architects. New technologies to learn every day.
Let's look at the key aspects of setting up a good composable architecture:
Of course, aside from the best strategy for adopting a composable architecture, there are also the technical aspects that underlie IT systems:
There are several technologies and frameworks that are related to composable architectures, including:
There are many other technologies that should be mentioned to give a more complete picture of IT evolutions in the field of composable architectures, but we leave that to everyone's personal study... and then if you have made it to the end of the article it means that the topic is part of your daily needs.
To conclude, the need to implement a composable architecture must necessarily be perceived as fundamental by all levels and business groups and not isolated to mere technical issues.
For technical departments, what I would recommend is to focus the study more and more on the evolving ecosystem, choosing architectures carefully, and balancing the available choices well with business needs. This means 1-2 hours a day to devote to studying the technologies.
So good study.
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