Service composability: Your path to cost-efficient operations

Highlights

You’ll learn about why your business needs service composability:

• Agility: Adapt quickly to market changes with modular components
• Scalability: Grow effortlessly by adjusting individual services
• Cost efficiency: Reduce redundancy and save resources with reusable components
• Future-proofing: Stay ahead by integrating new technologies seamlessly

Transform your business operations with service composability and bring innovation into your company!

Have you ever tried putting together furniture when the parts don’t fit? This happens when your furniture is designed without considering composability. Whether it's your tech stack or furniture, composability is the key to building your company. 

Service composability improves your company’s agility, makes it more scalable and ensures cost efficiency. It breaks complex systems into reusable and modular components, helping you respond to changing market requirements. 

But what exactly is composability, why do businesses need it, and what challenges might you face? Scroll down to explore more. 

What is service composability?

Service composability is all about designing software services you can mix and match to adapt to changing business requirements. For instance, you create modular services that perform specific functionality, making it easy to connect and use these functionalities across multiple software solutions. With a composable approach, you can assemble and disassemble services to keep up with market changes.

A composable approach scales your systems while creating an agile and collaborative workplace. You can launch new features or products to market. 

Principles of composability

The service composability principles are:

Modularity

Modularity involves breaking down applications into smaller and manageable components or modules. Using the modular principle, you can develop, test and deploy these components independently. This design principle achieves higher flexibility and efficiency in your development and business processes and allows easier updates and maintenance.

Reusability

Reusability is another service composability principle that lets you reuse the services within your application. One strategy is to reuse the software components of another, reducing the time required for new projects. Using a composable services architecture, you maximize the use of resources while reducing cost.

Discoverability

When your services are discoverable, you ensure higher collaboration and innovation at the workplace. It allows team members to:

• Use or reuse documents
• Share their findings and knowledge
• Build upon other’s work without duplicating the effort

This helps you develop more innovative but valuable services. 

Autonomy

Autonomy ensures each service or component functions independently and can evolve as technology changes without disrupting the entire architecture. This principle keeps your system stable, as changes to one service won't disrupt anything. When your team can choose independent components, they develop new and innovative products and services. 

Benefits of service composability

Enhances agility and responsiveness

You respond to market changes and customer demands using modular components, making your operations more agile. Modular components allow you to change your business operations without changing your entire system. This flexibility ensures rapid prototyping and deployment of new features. Adapting to changes increases customer satisfaction, and you're better equipped to deliver innovative solutions.

Makes your system more scalable

One of the biggest perks of service composability is the ability to scale your services. When you grow and service demands shift, composable architectures let you adjust individual components as needed. For instance, if a service starts getting busier, you can spread it across different servers to run everything without affecting your entire system.

Case study: How did Contentstack make Lepaya more scalable and efficient?

Lepaya faced scalability issues with its traditional CMS as it wanted to grow its business and expand into different markets. By using Contentstack's composable architecture, Lepaya increased development speed by 250% and improved content creation and localization processes. This upgrade enabled efficient localization in 8 languages, streamlined workflows and enhanced content reuse, freeing customer success managers to focus on clients. 

Lepaya grew from 300 to 7,500 entries, with faster translations and a scalable system.

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 case study here.

Minimizes cost through efficient use of resources

Reusable components or services reduce the need for redundant development efforts by allowing many projects to share the same functionalities. This makes your development process easier and saves time and cost. You can reuse independently existing components rather than starting everything from scratch, leading to more efficient and innovative solutions.

Future-proofs your business operations

Composable architecture's modular nature integrates with new technologies, keeping your business current with industry advancements. Such a flexible approach adapts to new trends and innovations, future-proofing your business operations. Using a composable architecture, you respond to changing market demands and customer expectations while implementing updates or changes with minimal disruption to existing systems.

Reduces wastage

With composability, you build a central library of components. Making these components discoverable by other teams reduces the risk of wasting resources. You no longer build something other teams are already using, achieving greater efficiency for your business. 

Service composability in a microservice architecture

Service composability is the foundation of microservice architecture that lets you build apps as a collection of independently deployable services. Think of it like assembling a Lego set, where each piece (or microservice) has a specific function. The composable nature offers more flexibility and makes your system more scalable.

Because these services are composable, you can join and rearrange them together. Your team can try new things and update the system. For example, if a company wants to add a new payment option, they can change the payment microservice and use it without affecting the rest of the system.

Service composability strengthens your ability to adapt to technological or market changes. Your teams can roll out updates and new features by mixing and matching different microservices, all while keeping the system stable. 

A composable approach supports continuous delivery and deployment practices, streamlining the software development. For instance, an e-commerce site can scale its inventory management microservice during holiday sales, ensuring it meets the surge in demand without facing any glitches.

Using service composability within a microservice architecture, your company aligns your tech capabilities with business goals.

Challenges in service composability

Complexity of integrations

Integrating services can get tricky as you add more services, reducing communications and increasing delays. 

Solution: Use application programming interface (API) management and service discovery tools for smooth interaction. Set clear contracts and document each API to simplify integration and ensure each component communicates with the other.

Data consistency

When different services handle different parts of your data, keeping everything consistent can be tough, creating data inconsistency.

Solution: To maintain data integrity, use consistency models and techniques for managing distributed transactions. Centralized logging and monitoring tools can track data flow and spot potential issues.

Performance overhead

Many service calls can cause latency issues, slowing down performance.

Solution: A microservices framework that supports performance optimization can boost responsiveness and efficiency.

Organizational silos

Switching to a composable architecture might reveal or worsen existing silos, reducing teamwork.

Solution: Encourage collaboration by forming cross-functional teams with shared ownership of services. Regular communication improves transparency and promotes a unified approach to solving problems.

FAQs

What is meant by service composability?

Service composability means designing services that are modular, reusable and combined to make new applications.

What is a composable service?

A composable service is like a building block you can use across various applications. It helps your systems become more adaptable and grow.

What is the service composition?

Service composition combines multiple service-oriented solutions to create a new application or functionality.

What is the meaning of composability?

Composability means designing composable systems with parts you can assemble and reuse in different ways.

Learn more

Don’t consider service composability a marketing gimmick. It’s a long-term strategy for making your systems flexible, scalable and adaptable. It drives additional value across your tech stack, delivering a consistent experience across multiple touchpoints and channels. 

To understand how the right composable architecture enables rapid innovation and lowers maintenance costs, talk to us today.