Intro to Composable Architecture

A great website is performant, secure, and cost-effective. It serves its users, developers, and editors with equal importance.

This requires intuitive design, the right content, and a work environment conducive to delivering both, along with rock-solid code that brings that design and content to life in the most cost-effective way possible.

Building such a site is challenging at any scale, but is particularly difficult for complex enterprise organizations.

For those new to the concept, Composable Architecture is a new way to approach building websites and web apps, and it scales seamlessly to support common Enterprise use cases. Microservices embody the primary paradigm shift in moving from a monolithic to composable architecture. Rather than functions and services being coupled in the same application, deployed to the same servers, they are split, distributed, and stateless.

Easily one of the largest and most exciting shifts in the world of web technology since the introduction of the ‘Cloud’, composable web architecture affords developers and businesses new levels of flexibility, speed, and control in how they build and ship for the web. 

How to use this Guide

This guide is intended for technical folks working on websites at large organizations, and generally for those organizations currently working with a monolithic system.

As such, we’ve assumed that you have a basic understanding of monolithic architectures and are interested in learning about modern composable architectures.

If you are not technical, we hope the basics above were enough to help grasp the primary benefits of moving to a composable system, and that you’ll send this guide to the technical players in your organization.

The sections below dive deeper into what we feel are the primary areas to address for those getting introduced to composable architectures.

This is by no means exhaustive. It’s a start and a high-level introduction. Our aim is for this to be a starting point to understanding how composable systems work, along with the benefits of moving away from a monolith.

The Modern Enterprise Stack

Discover the power of the modern enterprise stack – a decentralized system of independent services, unlocking scalability, flexibility, and collaboration.

Microservices & Serverless Functions

Rather than functions and services being coupled in the same application, deployed to the same servers, they are split, distributed, and stateless.

The Backend: Databases & Headless CMS

Delegating content management to an external service is one of the foundational patterns in a decoupled system.

The Frontend: Web Frameworks

Navigating the vast array of modern, JavaScript-based website frameworks.

Content Editing in Composable Systems

The shift to composable that began as a developer-led movement has evolved to provide unmatched content editing experiences.

Composable Content

To be most effective, editors should have a single source of truth to manage their content. And they should be able to do so visually to further boost their productivity.

CI/CD: Building, Deploying, & Hosting

Building, deploying, and hosting a composable site has a lot in common with monolithic systems, but also introduces several new concepts.

Common Website Features & Tooling

Many common website features are typically handled by third-party services in composable systems.

Common Enterprise Challenges

Comparing common challenges with web architectures between monolithic and composable systems

Getting Started: Migration Strategies

A collection of suggestions on how to get started with composable without the anxiety of replatforming

Wrapping Up: Is Composable Worth It?

Composable systems are ready to serve enterprises and come with a number of benefits
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