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Tag: composable architecture

The Rise of Composable Architectures to Replace Traditional Platforms

Traditional monolithic platforms have served their purpose. As technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing usher in a new digital age, flexible and modular architectures will take their place. Developers and cloud professionals should familiarize themselves with composable architecture’s principles, benefits and implementation best practices to remain competitive in an evolving technological landscape.

Composable Architectures Are Catching On

Composable architecture is not a niche concept. Market research shows it is a rapidly growing trend with significant projected growth. By 2028, its value will reach an estimated $11.8 billion, up from $5.2 billion in 2023. It will achieve a compound annual growth rate of 17.5% during the forecast period, demonstrating its rapid rise in popularity.

This expansion reflects increasing demand from organizations seeking greater flexibility and adaptability in their technology infrastructure, underscoring its importance to enterprise technology stacks.

Understanding Composable Architecture

In traditional monolithic architecture, an entire application is built, deployed and managed as a single inseparable codebase. Components remain tightly coupled despite being separate, creating dependencies that limit flexibility and slow development cycles.

The microservices architecture came next. It shortened development cycles to a mere few weeks by dividing applications into smaller, independently deployable units. Components scaled independently, services were communicated through well-defined APIs and containerization technologies simplified deployment.

While microservices are beneficial, they don’t live up to their promise of independence. If complexity is spread across systems and each deployment requires extensive coordination between teams, the architecture is still a traditional distributed monolith. It forces everything to scale, deploy and fail together.

Composable architecture is a modern software design philosophy that leverages smaller, API-first, modular components. This approach allows organizations to build applications from truly independent, interchangeable parts that communicate through well-defined interfaces.

Modularity, interoperability and reusability are fundamental. Developers achieve them with microservices, API-first, cloud-native and headless (MACH) principles. Professionals deploy and manage services separately.

The Business Benefits of Modularity

By enabling organizations to easily upgrade, swap or add individual functionalities, MACH principles can anchor IT execution to business objectives. This modularity delivers tangible advantages that extend beyond technical improvements.

Organizations can connect to different content repositories, modify individual components or introduce new capabilities without disrupting or overhauling the entire system. The primary benefits are agility, scalability and innovation.

With modular architectures, businesses can replace or update specific functionalities, such as payment gateways, search or content management systems. For instance, they can upgrade enterprise resource planning software by breaking down a monolithic system into flexible API-first modules.

By upgrading legacy systems, companies can benefit from enhanced performance, greater internal controls and decreased maintenance costs. In addition to delivering direct benefits, modularity mitigates opportunity costs by facilitating cloud functionality. These modern capabilities improve collaboration, reduce data loss and prevent technological obsolescence.

Greater resilience would be incredibly beneficial, as the average organization loses approximately $1.5 million to IT downtime each year. Unplanned downtime is even more expensive. With a cloud-native architecture, they can avoid the vast majority of these losses.

Guidance for Successful Adoption

Organizations must methodically implement a composable architecture. A successful transition involves careful strategic planning, a rigorous technology selection process and a culture of continuous improvement among teams.

Teams should choose a new architectural framework that offers an API-first conversion with a centralized hub for managing all component communications. This architectural foundation ensures seamless integration and reduces complexity as the system scales.

They should also fully replace their legacy technology stack with modular, cloud-native components to support this transition. Half-measures that retain monolithic components alongside new modular services create technical debt and limit the advantages of composability.

Preparing for the Next Technological Shift

Adopting composable architectures is a strategic imperative for future-proofing an organization. The adaptability of this approach provides significant cost-efficiency and makes it easier to expand and integrate future AI capabilities.

A modular API-first architecture is inherently better positioned to integrate emerging technologies like advanced AI and quantum computing. High throughput, reliable performance and greater customization are key to quickly adopting transformative technologies. Companies can future-proof their infrastructure to support emerging use cases.

This approach provides a level of adaptability that monolithic systems cannot match, as legacy platforms are having an increasingly difficult time maintaining compatibility with rapidly evolving technologies that are dynamic and data-intensive.

Composing Your Competitive Advantage

Organizations that embrace composable architectures position themselves to respond quickly to market changes, integrate emerging technologies and maintain operational efficiency. This transformative shift is a critical method for building a lasting competitive advantage in a dynamic digital world.

May 13, 2026
Netlify Unfurls Composable Jamstack Framework for Web Apps

At its Compose 2023 conference, Netlify today launched a composable framework that promises to make it simpler to build web applications spanning multiple backend services.

Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann said the Netlify Composable Web Platform provides a more holistic approach for loosely coupling the frontend of a web application with backend services that can be swapped out as needed.

The goal is to make it simpler to unify content, data sources, code and infrastructure at a higher level of abstraction while providing development teams with a maximum amount of flexibility, he added.

The Netlify Composable Web Platform consists of Netlify Core to manage workflows, Netlify Connect to access content and data sources and Netlify Create to build applications using JavaScript, application programming interfaces (APIs) and markup languages, otherwise known as Jamstack, framework.

Collectively, the tools will enable development teams to move away from monolithic web applications that are more difficult to update and maintain, noted Biilmann. Instead, development teams can compose applications faster using a framework that automates many of the underlying processes that conspire to slow down application development, he added.

In the face of challenging economic headwinds, interest in improving developer productivity is rising because organizations need their existing teams to consistently deliver applications faster. Most organizations can’t afford to continue expanding development teams when the current processes relied on to build software result in developers spending only a quarter of their time writing code.

There is also a greater need for collaboration using a framework that enables different members of a development team to build elements of an application in isolation from one another without impacting the entire application. Each organization will need to decide for itself whether it wants to make applications from multiple services, but at a time when the speed of adding new capabilities to an application is core to an organization’s ability to differentiate itself, the need for a different methodology for building applications has never been more apparent.

There is, of course, no shortage of frameworks for building web applications, but DevOps teams have a vested interest in making sure that whichever one is adopted is based on a modern architecture. The time and effort required to support monolithic applications in an era where new capabilities need to be added regularly has become cost-prohibitive. The challenge is finding a framework that enables developers to quickly build applications that can be deployed within the context of a DevOps workflow that typically needs to support applications being developed in multiple programming languages.

It’s not clear who inside IT organizations is driving adoption of composable frameworks for building the next generation of applications, but as more organizations become dependent on software, legacy approaches to building monolithic applications have become antiquated. The good news is that in terms of the developer talent pool, there are large numbers that are already familiar with multiple variants of the JavaScript programming language. The challenge, as always, is making sure that whatever code finds its way into a production environment is actually reliable enough to consistently drive a business process.

October 19, 2023
Supergraph: One GraphQL Schema to Rule Them All

GraphQL has been garnering much interest as a way to seamlessly interact with backend services. The query language is a boon for frontend developers, too, as it conveniently allows you to fetch the specific fields you require, thus eliminating the potential overfetching or underfetching concerns of REST APIs. And as GraphQL adoption matures within organizations, there is increasing interest (and investment) in how enterprises can use GraphQL to securely unify their growing catalog of disparate microservices and APIs.

Using GraphQL as a meta layer could help unite many disparate systems under a single unified schema. This would enable the age-old promise of composability, in which software building blocks are seamlessly pulled together to assemble applications and unique experiences for different client types. However, managing GraphQL at scale can become tricky. And when a schema gets really large, it then may require a schema of its own! This is where the concept of the supergraph comes in.

I recently met with Geoff Schmidt, Apollo GraphQL CEO, to discover what a supergraph is and how it may help platforms aggregate their backend microservices. According to Schmidt, “Developers want this composition layer for one abstract view of all their services.” Below, we’ll explore the concept of the supergraph and look at some new open source components that may help you enable GraphQL-based composability in your organization.

Microservices Enable Composability

First off, what do we mean by composability? Well, composable architecture is intrinsically linked with microservices. You can think of each microservice as a single lego piece that makes up one aspect of an application. For example, Uber uses 4,000 microservices to power its backend. These services span from maps, currency conversions, driver reviews, payments and other components. When combined, they ultimately create the convenience and the sleek user experience that is Uber.

Historically, software developers were overseeing larger monolithic applications in which a single client was interconnected to a web server, Schmidt explained. On the other hand, microservices tend to be more domain-specific and used in tandem with other microservices. They’re also typically easier to iterate on and faster to ship when compared to monolithic codebases.

The Need for Aggregation

As a result of the microservices age, applications typically pull in far more data from various sources. For example, a banking application might loop in a mortgage service, investment service and other data sources to display a combined net worth on a screen. This explosion in microservices has created a “polygon environment” spanning databases and APIs, increasing service complexity, said Schmidt.

Nowadays, many third-party components must be combined to render an experience. However, supporting this composability can be challenging for developers and backend API teams—not to mention that handwriting a backend-for-frontend could be burdensome. “App developers are slowed down by the need to integrate or compose these backend services,” said Schmidt. “Developers need a way to put all those pieces back together.”

What is Supergraph?

Supergraph can be thought of as a graph of graphs. The vision is to have one GraphQL schema and one ingress port to oversee many services. Creating a supergraph is becoming more accessible, too, as more open source projects emerge to enable this paradigm. For example, Apollo recently open sourced some components that can help to build and operate a supergraph. These include Federation, which helps to create a data graph across multiple services, and the Apollo Router, a tool written in Rust that decides how to route queries. Apollo has also open sourced a supergraph demo along with other resources.

A supergraph architecture is already powering Expedia, Walmart, Netflix, Paypal, the New York Times and other large environments, said Schmidt. For example, Expedia has used a supergraph to combine flights, rental cars and other microservices to create integrated experiences. Hivee, an upstart modern supermarket chain, also uses a supergraph to unite its investment into APIs.

According to Schmidt, the fundamental benefit is that less time is spent writing integration code which means faster development speed and the ability to quickly pivot your business. “It allows you to change business quickly to meet the needs of your customers.” A supergraph could also enable greater visibility into your API estate, making auditing easier.

A key benefit of the above components is that they already have a proven track record running at a commercial scale. But outside of the Apollo projects, other groups are attempting to codify a similar GraphQL schema aggregation concept, as well. For example, WunderGraph utilizes GraphQL within a “virtual graph” that acts as a common language to call various underlying APIs.

Repercussions of ‘One Graph to Rule Them All’

Schmidt said the hope is that, at the end of the day, this abstraction can contribute to “making the world a little more human-centric.” This is because GraphQL can enable less rigid apps that conform to unique user tastes. But a robust composition layer will be necessary to allow such reconfigurations.

Of course, as I’ve covered previously, there are significant security hurdles to address when supplying so much power to a single entryway. Increased GraphQL reliance will require forethought into new potential security risks, such as schema introspection and object-level authorization control.

According to Schmidt, a GraphQL composition layer presents an opportunity to enforce security controls. He defines these as contracts that create access rules for a particular set of users. By declaratively managing GraphQL security, a development team, in essence, could expose a subgraph of the supergraph for a partner to consume. The graph could even be segmented for internal teams.

A central point of ingress will require authorization rules to protect user privacy and avoid breaking the rule of least privilege. Schmidt also advocates for backend schemas to be built for app developers who understand their needs, instead of precisely mapping logic to business models.

Supergraph: A Graph of Graphs

Software is becoming more modular, which has resulted in an explosion of unique microservices and APIs. And we’re now at another tipping point in how software architecture is divided and combined, said Schmidt. He now sees GraphQL as a prime opportunity to create software architectures that call multiple backend services with a single GraphQL query.

“GraphQL is the composition layer you need to build modern applications,” said Schmidt. “We’re super excited about this. Users have shown that GraphQL is the future. Supergraph is such a powerful technology, and we’re excited to bring this to everybody.”

June 21, 2022
The Lego Approach to Overcoming the Developer Divide

As end-user demand for new services continues to rise and businesses adapt to changing times, digitalization has never been more important. Pressure is increasing on organizations to deliver digital transformation initiatives more quickly as 55% of CIOs in 2021 said they were increasing staff to accelerate their digital programs. The cloud is essential for this. Because it can enable new opportunities for revenue and quicker delivery to market, the cloud is the way forward for companies that want digital success. That’s why 95% of those surveyed by Accenture say they’ve adopted advanced cloud services.

However, this is not without its challenges. For one, teams need the skills to match—individuals who know how cloud works and the expertise to unlock its potential. But this is proving difficult as talent remains hard to recruit (a recent Gartner report found that IT executives view the talent shortage as the most significant barrier to deploying cloud, edge computing, automation and other emerging technologies). In addition, as 92% of companies believe DevOps is crucial for revolutionizing their digital strategies, it’s worrying to see a new report from Boston Consulting Group that revealed up to three-quarters of developers are looking to change their jobs within two to three years.

This is something enterprises need to address if they wish to accelerate digital transformation programs and take advantage of the emerging cloud technologies that support the growing need for a distributed cloud architecture. Without the required developer expertise, organizations will fail to address end user expectations and fall behind their rivals.

A Concrete Problem

While the shortage of developers was an issue even before the pandemic, the problem is only getting worse due to the increasing need for digital transformation. It is putting more pressure than ever on existing developers and making it difficult for organizations as they struggle to recruit more talent. In fact, research found that pressure on digital architects has more than doubled during the pandemic, with almost 50% saying they are currently under high or extremely high pressure to deliver digital projects.

This skills shortage is an important issue for companies to consider. It is well-known that the expertise needed to deploy and maintain cloud services differs considerably from what’s needed for on-premises environments. Without those skills, it becomes difficult for IT teams to oversee and understand what is happening with regard to their cloud deployments, and it ultimately hinders organizations from generating new revenue opportunities through increased innovation. Cloud is a whole new world where control and insight are limited, there are new inflexible cost structures to get used to and other departments can easily procure new applications without the IT team’s involvement. However, we still see examples of organizations being tripped up by these differences.

Organizations take proactive steps to keep their developers engaged and happy to avoid digital transformation burnout and ensure they make the most out of their cloud deployments.

One Brick at a Time

One way enterprises can do this is by embracing a Lego approach to their digital transformation journey. By adopting a composable business strategy, organizations are in the best position possible to remove pressure from developers and drive increased innovation with less need for highly specific technical expertise.

When building things with Lego, even if you’re starting without instructions, you don’t need to completely start from scratch—and you can use the same bricks time and time again. Composability, or the notion of building and configuring infrastructure and applications from component parts with well-defined interfaces, means the same is true when developing new digital services. Instead of having to start from scratch each time or write specific code, developers and even business users can quickly innovate new experiences by composing and decomposing existing digital assets and reusing them—just like Lego bricks. In this way, the company is using its existing skillset to the fullest; maximizing the value of its resources and allowing it to concentrate on actually developing new experiences and services.

Perhaps most importantly—especially for developers—this means less pressure on development teams, not only because there’s less need to reskill but because composability means they no longer need to worry about managing underlying infrastructure or reconfiguring physical assets like servers, storage and connectivity. Instead, they can manage all assets through a single unified control plane that spans multiple clouds, right through to the edge.

Making use of Existing Resources

As part of this composable approach, enterprises should also examine how they move away from legacy technology, making sure they invest in innovations that leverage their existing in-house developer expertise. For instance, using a database-as-a-service platform that has the same programming language and tools that developers are already used to will accelerate adoption and reduce training costs.

The move away from legacy technology won’t just increase value for the money at a time when developers are becoming harder to recruit and budgets are tight. It will, again, also make life easier for developers. Instead of having to struggle with the integration of older systems with newer innovations, next-generation technologies will make this process harmonious and easy, further reducing the pressure and speeding up digitalization.

Creating a Solid Foundation

The developer divide is an issue that organizations need to take seriously if they wish to drive forward their digital transformation initiatives. At a time when demand for improved end user experiences is high, the need for developers has never been greater.

While recruitment and retention remain a challenge, the Lego approach of composability means enterprises do not need to lose out. Using the existing skills and resources of a company, composability propels faster innovation and greater agility.

January 27, 2022
How Low-Code Enables the Composable Enterprise
Enterprises know that their customers and partners expect a superior personalized experience. After all, customer experience has been a top priority for organizations over the last decade. However, despite all the technological advancements and transformation initiatives, the ability to deliver innovation with speed continues to elude.

Without this ability, enterprises constantly play catch-up with rapidly shifting business dynamics and customer expectations.

Why is Strategic Agility so Elusive?

Enterprises are unfortunately locked in a situation that Gartner Research identifies as “static application experience”. It is a paradigm of rigid and bloated application architecture, creating inertia that organizations find difficult to navigate around. This technological impedance is one of the primary reasons (besides organizational culture and structural challenges) at the root of organizational sluggishness.

To adapt to the challenges of the modern world, enterprises need to move from a static application experience to a more dynamic one. This can be achieved through the approach — wrapped around a goal — of a composable enterprise.

Composable Enterprise is the Future of Applications

A composable enterprise aims to create an application architecture wherein enterprises can deliver various functions through composition (as against development), by leveraging packaged business capabilities (PBCs). Gartner estimates that by 2023, 30% of new applications will be delivered, priced, and consumed as libraries of packaged business capabilities, up from fewer than 5% in 2020.

To be fair, this run-up to a composable enterprise is not a fresh-of-the-press revelation. Enterprises have been attempting to move from hardcore coding-based development to a more service-and-composition-oriented architecture over the last couple of decades, albeit only in pockets and not as fast as they would have wished.

Composable enterprise has become the need of the hour. And this is being driven by the sense of urgency created by multi-faceted disruption across industries, coupled with technological advancements that make it possible for organizations to accomplish it at an enterprise scale.

One such advancement comes in the form of low code digital transformation platforms.

How do Low-code Platforms drive Composable Enterprise?

According to Forrester Research, low-code development platforms are emerging as a key strategy to accelerate app delivery to support digital business transformation. They have the potential to make software development as much as ten times faster than traditional methods. Low-code platforms use visual composition and a modeling-based approach to speed up application development.

A good low-code platform drives the creation of a composable enterprise in two ways, both of which are critical for long term sustainability:
- By enabling rapid development of modern PBCs that deliver cutting-edge functionality without having to rebuild the organizational core, thereby protecting decades of investments in legacy and core applications
- By providing the core capability to create applications through composition and abstraction with a modeling-driven application environment, wherein the organization can create customer-centric business applications that deliver a dynamic omnichannel experience and drive the end-to-end customer journey
Is There a Catch?

Low code platforms come in various shapes and sizes, from those supporting the creation of relatively simpler stand-alone applications to those that enable the rapid development of mission-critical enterprise-scale applications with various functional components. Mostly, the latter category forms the core of a composable enterprise.

To drive a composable enterprise, a low code platform needs to be equipped with a variety of capabilities. It should:
- Speed up pro-grade development through modular, modeling-driven, and abstraction-oriented development
- Support a variety of business and technological needs, such as workflows, content management, straight-through transactions, mobile apps, collaboration, customer self-service, omnichannel customer engagement and automated business rules
- Offer service-oriented integration that can extend beyond the organizational boundaries
- Enable rationalization of application portfolio by helping avoid the introduction of multiple point-solutions in the mix with its own ability to develop a variety of applications quickly
- Prevent shadow IT through central governance, visibility, and guardrails, without hindering innovation
- Enable agile, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and adherence to quality standards and architectural requirements
- Enable, even catalyze, change with traceability, thereby ensuring long term sustainability of business applications
What Next?

The ability of organizations to accomplish a composable enterprise of the future will depend on a multitude of factors. It is essentially a transformational journey.

It is important to take the right steps and build in phases, starting from establishing a core low code platform and building peripheral capabilities with time. Picking the right set of applications and establishing early wins go a long way in building momentum towards the long-term goals.

Identification of the right low code platform that can drive your transformation journey to a composable enterprise is critical for achieving a composable enterprise.
January 11, 2022
Step Aside, Monoliths: Meet the Composable Enterprise
A composable enterprise, defined by Gartner as “an organization that delivers business outcomes and adapts to the pace of business change”, relies on the assembly of interchangeable application building blocks. This architectural overhaul has largely been driven by a demand for more configurable application experiences, and the need to evolve existing application portfolios that are often too risky and costly to replace.

New business opportunities require agility from application portfolios; however, many enterprises are still limited in their ability to adapt. Why? They rely on monolithic ERP systems and cumbersome legacy applications with static processes and haphazard structures. A modular setup can enable a business to rearrange as required depending on external or internal factors, such as shifts in consumer attitudes or sudden supply chain disruptions. Organizations are experiencing these shifts now and require a new approach to enterprise applications to be able to adapt.

Bridge the CX Gap with Greater Composability

A composability approach is the best way to capture all the advantages of modern enterprise software. According to a recent Boomi report, by 2023 organizations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace the competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation. This shift requires enterprises to rethink how they architect their operations, harness a combination of packaged functions and technologies and successfully deliver seamless moments of service to their customers.

There are three key ways that businesses can make the composability shift:
- Adopting a service mindset
- Scaling the delivery of microservices
- Packaging business capabilities using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
1. Designing for Service: Compete on Outcomes, not on Products

A composable enterprise whose portfolio is made up of heterogeneous applications from a palette of best-of-breed solutions allows organizations to address key inflection points throughout every customer, product or service lifecycle.

As more consumers demand continuous value and reliability throughout an asset’s lifetime, businesses must shift to selling outcomes and experiences instead of products to meet these new expectations for quality service. This requires each part of an operation to align, not around immediate sales or revenue, but around delivering a quality Moment of Service™ — the inflection point where everything comes together to create better value and outcomes for customers.

Moving to a servitized model requires a composable stack to deliver services to order. At a systems level, this transformation requires organizations to adapt applications dynamically and deliver positive customer experiences with effective quality management, customer support, and access to complete information about the service offering. Unlike traditional enterprise software, this involves connecting data and applications that have often sat in separate silos. A composable enterprise can provide a service-orientated architecture, that enables businesses to become outcome-based and ready to quickly adapt to future disruptions.

2. Scale Component-based Architecture with Microservices

If applications are built as loosely coupled services, then companies can employ a composable architecture to capitalize on independently deployable modules that are organized around business capabilities. This allows organizations to swap modules in and out, to suit emergent needs and build a well-structured best-fit solution for their unique business.

In contrast to a monolithic architecture, businesses can easily add resources to the most needed microservice rather than having to scale the entire application as demand for an application increases. In practice, this allows businesses to simplify customizable workflows and optimize business processes while leveraging and applying tools such as robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, or the plethora of hyper-automation capabilities available today.

3. Embrace Open-ended APIs to Maximize Data-sharing Capabilities

Packaged business capabilities (PBC) assembled using APIs are the foundation of every composable enterprise. They are used by businesses to secure data across cloud services, business systems and mobile applications. Historically, APIs have been used in monolithic applications to exchange data between the entire application and external applications and services. In composable software, APIs exchange data from individual modules to external applications and within the application — from module to module. This has significant implications for how systems are designed and built.

APIs can provide a controlled and consumable method for connecting and sharing consumer and business data by creating experiences tailored to individual needs. For instance, an API-centric model can secure and manage data access to help businesses with faster decision-making and deliver relevant new services adaptable to market changes. In the future, there will be more automated continuous process improvements as machine learning models recommend, or even proactively make, process changes to improve outcomes for the business and end customer.

Opt-in to the Composability Evolution

To overcome the limitations of monolithic applications, businesses must rethink their approach to enterprise applications — starting with the business architecture and technology stack. A composable software architecture enables organizations to address the internal and external pressures that send shockwaves throughout the value chain.

As a composable enterprise, organizations can re-engineer their businesses to ensure customer touchpoints and stages come together for better moments of service, but companies must be certain that processes are optimized across each of these inflection points to mitigate issues and fuel growth. An IT architecture built on a foundation of composability will be essential to the successful delivery of a software-powered business development strategy that can provide continual value to customers and the business itself.
January 11, 2022
Safeguarding Composable Architecture Applications Based on API-enabled Components
The use of composable methodologies for application development is growing rapidly. The reason: It offers many benefits that speed the development process and opens up application creation to developers of all skill levels. However, the speed and ease-of-use benefits, via the reuse of pre-built components, can introduce new security risks that traditional security management solutions might not be able to handle.

The rising interest and adoption of composable architecture seems to be a matter of the right approach at the right time. Businesses today are under great pressure to innovate, transform, and offer new products and services. The pressure is coming from both inside organizations and from customers. Those within need applications, tools, and services to increase productivity, boost efficiencies, and cut costs. Customers want fast service, improved engagement, and quick responses to any queries and questions.

A composable approach to application development helps businesses deliver the needed solutions at the pace of modern business change. It accomplishes this by using composable entities that offer self-contained business capabilities. These elements make use of APIs and can be assembled and combined into larger applications.

Bolstered by other industry trends

Another reason for the popularity of composable application development is that it is a good match and complements other application development trends.

For example, its usefulness is enhanced by low-code/no-code development methods. Low-code/no-code saw great adoption during the pandemic. Businesses realized they needed to be more responsive to fast marketing changes, and their at-home workforce needed easy-to-use solutions.

The surge in their use continues this year. The low code development technologies market is projected to grow by 23% this year over last.

Many of the reasons companies cite for moving to low code are similar to why they use composable application architectures.

Namely, professional developers work faster, and they can spend more time on higher-level development problems. And both low code and composable methodologies let individuals and business groups with limited or no development expertise create their own powerful applications.

So, in many ways, the two technologies go hand-in-hand in many organizations.

Similarly, many of the underlying rationale and principles for using composability align with the other cloud-native methodologies. Specifically, with a cloud-native approach, applications are broken into loosely coupled microservices and container elements that are then assembled into a larger application. Specific elements in a cloud-native application, such as a front-end application or a business process, can be standardized and made available as a composable component in a cloud-native application.

What’s needed for security?

Enabling development using composable elements centers on APIs. Specifically, with respect to composability, Gartner notes that businesses “seeking to kick-start efforts to turn an organization into a composable business” should:
- Enforce composable application design by ensuring application development teams use available external and internal API products
- Educate teams about how to exploit existing applications and platforms for composability by using application APIs and low-code development and integration platforms.
Hence, security efforts must change from traditional approaches to ones that are more API-centric. Solutions must observe all user activity and API interactions, then act on unexpected user and API behaviors.

Solutions that address composable application security must offer infrastructure, services, and code-level threat analysis in a single platform to facilitate collaboration and expedite threat resolution to meet the needs of modern DevSecOps approaches to application development and security.

Such capabilities are critical given the complexity of modern cloud-native applications. In many cases, when creating applications with composable elements, hidden inter-dependencies can arise. Traditional security solutions often will not be able to detect such issues or trace the source of problems down to the composable element level.

Furthermore, while each element of an application may be secure, the interplay between the composable elements and the data exchanged between them can introduce risks that need a more API-centric solution which understands the greater application context.
June 17, 2021