Define composable: Flexible systems for future growth

Highlights

You’ll learn about the benefits of composability:

• Makes your business agile: Quickly adapt to market changes and integrate new technologies
• Helps you become modular: Independent components enhance flexibility and speed up development
• Offers resilience: Maintain operations smoothly during disruptions
• Improves efficiency: Reuse components to reduce costs and streamline workflows

Embrace composability to future-proof your business and stay ahead in the digital landscape.

Customer needs and market demands are frequently changing. This means that speed and flexibility are crucial to success. Traditional software development approaches fail to keep pace with such dynamic activities. These systems cannot meet the market’s demands and evolving business requirements. 

As a result, many businesses are turning to composable systems to overcome the limitations of a traditional platform. These systems break down larger projects into smaller and more modular components, each focusing on a specific problem or use case. 

To understand the concept better, let's first define composable and learn about the business case for composable components and how these systems interact with other technologies like application programming interfaces (APIs) and digital experience platforms (DXPs).

What is composability?

Composability is a system design approach that increases business agility and accelerates application development. A composable system reuses existing components and assets and assembles them differently to meet specific customer needs. Each component addresses a specific business case or problem. You can put together different parts in various ways. This lets you create new experiences. You don’t need to build the system or software from the beginning. 

This approach speeds up development while helping you update or replace each component separately. It provides ongoing enhancements and innovations without disrupting your other functionalities.

For example, a retail company can use a composable system, which helps them add new payment methods or chatbot services to meet customer needs and enhance the shopping experience.

Principles of composability

To build flexible, scalable systems that can adapt to changing market demands and technological advancements, understanding the principles of composability is essential:

Modularity

Modularity creates systems as self-sufficient components that operate. This approach facilitates parallel teamwork, improves collaboration and accelerates development, making your business resilient and adaptable.

Interoperability

Interoperability enables diverse systems to work together through standardized interfaces, enhancing business integration and functionality.

Reusability

Reusable components speed up the development processes and reduce costs by sharing components across projects.

Discoverability

Discoverability refers to the ease with which developers can find and use existing components within a system.

How does a composable system drive business agility and resilience?

Composable systems can make your business more agile and resilient. By following a composable approach, you can adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs. The modular design means you can integrate new technologies and features without expensive overhauls or prolonged downtime. With such flexibility, your business can update or add new offerings in real time as customer preferences change. Companies can keep things running even during disruptions by separating individual components. Composable systems like Contentstack make your business processes more efficient and encourage innovation. 

 For example, a retail company using a composable system can implement a new payment gateway to accommodate a trending payment method, meeting customer demands without interrupting business operations.

Here are a few other reasons how composable systems make your business agile and resilient:

Rapid deployment and personalization

Composable systems deliver and deploy systems. They give you the power to roll out and tweak solutions, helping you stay ahead of market trends and meet customer demands. 

Think of it as building with Lego blocks—using modular and interchangeable pieces, you can adapt your systems to fit specific needs. 

Reduces downtime and risk

Composable systems are like a well-oiled machine. Each part does its job without tripping up the others. This setup is excellent for reducing downtime and keeping risks in check. Imagine changing or fixing one part without overhauling the entire system. If something goes wrong with one piece, it doesn't mean the whole system falls apart.

Strengthens business continuity

Composable systems ensure your business is ready for anything. They're built tough, helping you mix new tech and processes. A flexible and dependable system is a necessity. When you use composable systems, you keep everything running and increase customer confidence. Your customers know they can rely on your consistent service.

Case study: How did Contenstack help Lepaya increase growth?

Lepaya switched from its old CMS to Contentstack's composable architecture. This move helped Lepaya grow while improving its ability to customize and localize content. They turbocharged their development speed by a whopping 250% and expanded their language support from 2 to 8. Lepaya streamlined its workflow and improved planning by reusing content in different modules. The result? Content entries increased from 300 to 7,500.

After using Contentstack, Darya Meinecke, Content Manager at Lepaya, said:

“Contentstack reduced our workload significantly. Internal clients and learning designers even say, ‘If I build things in WordPress it takes me ages, but if I use Contentstack, it takes minutes!’ We can copy modules, tag them, search and filter to find the entries we need. With WordPress, that wasn’t an option.”

Read the complete case study here.

Composability in different contexts

Composability in software development

In software development, composability focuses on microservices and APIs. Developers can craft applications as a collection of independent services, each interacting over defined interfaces. This encourages agile development and supports continuous integration and delivery, helping your team to roll out updates with minimal hiccups. 

Consequently, you can respond to user feedback and introduce new features, ensuring they stay competitive.

Composability in business processes

Composable systems aren't about technology; they impact your business processes. When you use composability, you simplify workflows by integrating different tools and platforms tailored to specific tasks. This flexibility allows teams to combine the best resources to tackle different business challenges, improving efficiency and productivity. Plus, being able to adjust and change processes means you stay responsive to demand shifts or market conditions.

Composability in infrastructure

Composable infrastructure reconfigures hardware and software resources, allowing your businesses to tailor their systems to meet specific business needs. Adaptability benefits cloud computing, where companies can adjust resources based on demand, ensuring cost-effectiveness and increasing efficiency. Moreover, composable infrastructure speeds up the deployment of applications and services as you can allocate resources without changing your entire system.

Composability in digital systems

Digital systems using composable architecture provide tailored user experiences by offering flexibility and personalization. This approach lets you connect different digital experience platforms (DXPs) via APIs. Your content creation is smooth and you provide omnichannel customer journeys that cater to unique needs and user preferences. Emphasizing integration and adaptability keeps your digital services relevant and engaging.

How to implement composability

Use these steps for implementing composable systems:

Assess your current systems and capabilities

Start by reviewing your current systems. Identify areas for improvement, such as resource optimization and system flexibility.

Adopt a flexible mindset

Cultivate an environment that welcomes change and encourages your team to try new things. Ensure everyone understands what composable means so they’re eager to build modular systems and see the benefits.

Choose the right technology

Pick technologies that fit a composable setup. This means using microservices and APIs that builds flexible components and make them work well together.

Establish governance frameworks

Create clear rules for building, documenting and reusing components. Strong guidelines make it easier to manage everything and find and use components.

Encourage cross-functional collaboration

Encourage open communication between different teams, such as development, operations and business. Teamwork brings diverse ideas that enhance your composable solutions.

Iterate and improve

Set up a plan for ongoing improvements. Regularly check how well your systems adapt to new business needs and market changes and adjust your approach.

Monitor performance and outcomes

Set up key performance indicators (KPIs) to track the performance of your composable systems. Monitor these metrics to ensure you see the expected benefits and make changes as needed.

FAQs

What does composable mean?

Composable means mixing and matching system components in different ways to fit specific needs.

What is the composability of software?

Composability of software helps you combine and recombine software components to create new functionalities.

What is composable technology?

Composable technology uses modular components you can integrate and configure to build flexible and scalable systems.

Learn more

Switching to a composable architecture ensures you adapt to the changing market demands and customer expectations. It increases collaboration among your team and makes your business more agile. As you work through the challenges of digital transformation, embracing a composable approach can future-proof your operations and keep you competitive. 

Are you curious about how composable systems can transform your business? Talk to us today.