by Sachin Rane, on Apr 1, 2022 7:04:44 PM
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Key takeaways
- Composable applications are business-driven rather than technology-driven and support BizDevOps.
- They offer better flexibility and resilience at the application core.
- They support faster feature upgrades and feature launches within a couple of days.
More and more businesses are looking at building composable application architectures. The primary idea is to improve the time-to-market for new feature implementations and immediately fulfill the business requirements. Today, most modern businesses prefer the hub and spoke approach for their application development over diffused application capabilities and separate investments in core ERP, CRM, and Analytics. Such composable applications are best delivered over the Cloud Native environment.
Why Composable Application Architecture?
Composable Application Architectures ensure application resilience through the approach of building and weaving together autonomous application packets over a central core. They resemble the microservices architecture, with the difference being that each application packet is a complete application in itself. In comparison, a microservice is one autonomous working feature of an application. One autonomous application packet may comprise multiple microservices. Either way, such a composable application architecture promotes innovation, modularity, agile upgrades, and flexibility, which facilitates a faster go-to-market. Its importance is vividly visible in globally disrupted markets where enterprises seek better sustenance and promulgation through innovation and future-proofing IT. It allows building on its core application as the business requirements arise, without going in for an investment in off-the-shelf capabilities. These autonomous capabilities can be scaled or descaled, as and when required.
Why do traditional application architectures fail business expectations?
Business requirements and customer expectations increase by the day. Application features must be assembled, reassembled, and disassembled over a highly flexible framework, in an agile environment. Traditional application monoliths are tightly coupled and have to follow a systematic and elaborate development cycle or SDLC, for both addition and deletion of features. Further, each feature implementation and testing requires significant time for deployment. This scenario is precisely where traditional application architectures fail expectations of a faster time-to-market and time-to-value.
How do composable applications score over traditional applications?
Composable applications are a loosely coupled congregation of autonomous application packets. This modular approach allows faster assembly and an equally faster disassembling of features. This resilience and flexibility go a long way in application upgrades and deployments. The modularization and congregation of the autonomous packets not only supports DevOps but also BizDevOps, where business users also contribute significantly to the scrums, towards a faster time to deployment. It allows to unlock real business intelligence insitu through unified data management and is superior to invasive integration of different commercial-off-the-shelf capabilities that is approached as an after-thought. Such composable application architectures are best delivered over Cloud Native environments that support scaling-up and scaling-down, as per requirement.
Significance of composable application architectures
Composable application architectures support a dynamic work environment and BizDevOps. They deliver -
- Improved time-to-market: Fast feature upgrades and equally faster deployments allow capturing the market share and staying ahead in a competitive market.
- Future-proofed homogenous application management and orchestration: Born-in-the-Cloud application architectures are future-ready as well as support central application management and orchestration to promote cost savings.
- Unified data management: Promote unified data management to generate better business insights as compared to integration as an after-thought.
- Democratization: The autonomy lies with the business instead of building technology-driven IT application architectures, which are tightly coupled, less resilient, and bulky.
- Holistic intelligence generation: They allow a better 360-degree view of the data that resides in one place compared to a distributed and siloed architecture, which is integrated later in the day.
- Resilience and Relevance: The architecture allows businesses to be resilient to the market conditions and business requirements as well as stay relevant at all times.
In short
Composable application architectures built on Cloud Native environments are more resilient. They support frequent feature updates and faster go-to-market with an equally faster time-to-value. They allow businesses to stay ahead through thick and thin in a dynamic market.
