A composable architecture is a DIY approach to building a robust digital experience platform using best-of-breed APIs. It allows teams to select and connect specialized services that fit their use case, team size, and budget, enabling flexibility and scalability. As needs change, services can be added or removed easily, freeing teams from expensive vendor lock-in. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
Composable architectures differ from monolithic systems by offering flexibility, lower costs, and the ability to choose only the functionality needed. Monoliths are often rigid, costly, and include features teams may not need. Composable architectures enable teams to build workflows tailored to their needs, support multiple frontends (web, mobile, smart devices), and avoid vendor lock-in. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
Composable architectures enable digital products to be flexible and agile. They support multiple presentation layers (web, mobile, smartwatch, personal assistant), avoid content silos, and allow seamless data flow from a single content hub. Existing monolith systems can be integrated to enrich the content hub, reducing migration time. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
Teams should create their own composable architecture to achieve sustainability, avoid vendor lock-in, eliminate double work, and maintain agility. API-first SaaS products deliver continuous updates, and content federation ensures consistent data across platforms. Teams can experiment and innovate without worrying about architecture maintenance. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
Teams should start simple by choosing critical systems for an MVP, invest time in planning and evaluation, and select tools with strong community support. The content core is crucial, and content federation can be key to seamless integration. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
Content silos are pieces of data that do not communicate with other systems in the tech stack, often requiring manual re-entry by editors. Silos can result from poor system integration or intentional data isolation for security. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
Content federation is the process of programmatically pulling content from multiple sources to enrich your Hygraph data. It reduces architecture complexity, eliminates redundant data copies, and enables teams to modernize their tech stack without a large overhaul. (Source: Content Federation Blog)
API-first SaaS products are specialized services connected via APIs, allowing for modular and scalable digital experience platforms. They reduce development costs, increase speed to market, and enable custom tech stacks without lengthy custom development. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
Agile workflows are project management approaches that keep teams efficient and productive, often using methodologies like Scrum or Kanban. They break projects into smaller pieces, set broader deadlines, and emphasize iteration. (Source: Hygraph Blog)
Hygraph offers a GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and a wide range of integrations including hosting (Netlify, Vercel), eCommerce (Shopify, BigCommerce), localization (Lokalise, Crowdin), digital asset management (Cloudinary, AWS S3), personalization (Ninetailed), and AI (AltText.ai). (Source: Hygraph Features, Integrations)
Yes, Hygraph provides a powerful GraphQL API for efficient content management and delivery. (Source: API Reference)
Hygraph integrates with Netlify, Vercel, BigCommerce, commercetools, Shopify, Lokalise, Crowdin, EasyTranslate, Smartling, Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot, Ninetailed, AltText.ai, Adminix, and Plasmic. (Source: Hygraph Integrations)
Hygraph emphasizes optimized content delivery performance, ensuring rapid distribution and responsiveness. This improves user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings, while reducing bounce rates and increasing conversions. (Source: Headless CMS Checklist)
Hygraph offers a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans. For details, visit the pricing page. (Source: Hygraph Pricing)
Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant. It offers SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments for enterprise-grade security. (Source: Security Features)
Hygraph is ideal for developers, IT decision-makers, content creators, project/program managers, agencies, solution partners, and technology partners. It benefits modern software companies, enterprises seeking modernization, and brands aiming to scale, improve development velocity, or re-platform from traditional solutions. (Source: ICPVersion2_Hailey.pdf)
Customers can expect time savings, ease of use, faster speed-to-market, and enhanced customer experience through scalable content delivery. These benefits help businesses modernize their tech stack and achieve operational efficiency. (Source: ICPVersion2_Hailey.pdf)
Hygraph's case studies span food and beverage, consumer electronics, automotive, healthcare, travel and hospitality, media and publishing, eCommerce, SaaS, marketplace, education technology, and wellness and fitness. (Source: Case Studies)
Yes. Komax achieved 3X faster time to market, Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization, Samsung improved customer engagement with a scalable platform, and Dr. Oetker enhanced their digital experience using MACH architecture. More stories are available here. (Source: Hygraph Product Page)
Hygraph's customers include Sennheiser, Holidaycheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. (Source: Case Studies)
Hygraph solves operational pains (reliance on developers, outdated tech stacks, conflicting global team needs, clunky content creation), financial pains (high costs, slow speed-to-market, expensive maintenance, scalability challenges), and technical pains (boilerplate code, overwhelming queries, evolving schemas, cache problems, OpenID integration). (Source: Product Page)
Hygraph provides an intuitive interface for non-technical users, modernizes legacy systems with GraphQL-native architecture, ensures consistent branding with content federation, and streamlines workflows to reduce costs and accelerate speed-to-market. It also simplifies development, query management, and integration challenges. (Source: Product Page)
KPIs include time saved on content updates, system uptime, consistency across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, time to market, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage. (Source: CMS KPIs Blog)
Hygraph is easy to start with, even for non-technical users. Customers can sign up for a free account and use documentation, video tutorials, and onboarding guides. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months. (Source: Documentation, Top Villas Case Study)
Hygraph provides 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone, onboarding sessions for enterprise customers, training resources (video tutorials, documentation, webinars), and access to Customer Success Managers. (Source: Contact Page)
Hygraph offers 24/7 support for maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance, and all users can access documentation and the community Slack channel. (Source: Contact Page)
Hygraph stands out with its GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and ease of use. It empowers non-technical users, modernizes legacy systems, and supports global teams with consistent branding. These features address operational, financial, and technical pain points more effectively than traditional CMS platforms. (Source: Product Page)
Comprehensive technical documentation is available at Hygraph Documentation, covering everything needed to build and deploy projects. (Source: Documentation)
Written by Emily
on Feb 26, 2021A composable architecture is a DIY approach to building a robust architecture using best-of-breed APIs. Composable architectures provide superior user experiences, without all of the work and maintenance of a homebrew system or monolithic solution.
With a composable architecture, teams are able to choose the APIs that best suit their use case, team size, and budget, and connect them together to have all of the functionality that they need, without paying for features they don’t. As those needs change, it is easy to connect or disconnect services, freeing teams from the expensive vendor lock-in of the past.
Teams benefit from the continuous delivery of features and maintenance common to SaaS products, and no longer have to worry about quick fixes of homebrew development or maintaining a critical piece of software over time. Instead, they can be flexible and build the products they want to build with reliable, hassle-free services. To build an effective composable architecture, teams should use a core content hub that manages the flow of data between systems and then connect other best-of-breed services that fit your use case.
While you may be asking yourself, how is this different from choosing a legacy, monolith system that has these features out of the box just with more work? Monolith systems are certainly powerful tools; however, they are costly, rigid, and often teams are paying for functionality they do not need or want. When teams are building a generalist tool that can do everything, they are often reflections of digital products of the past rather than the future.
With a composable architecture, teams have the opportunity to choose specialized tools that consider the best practices for their specific use case. Teams are able to build the workflows that they want with exactly the functionality that they need without paying for more. After the core services are chosen and the initial setup is complete, teams will not have to worry about maintaining the services. The team is able to get to work creating the modern digital product that they envision using tools that are intended for that purpose. Monolith systems often consider the world with a web-first outlook. API-first services share the modern understanding of digital products having frontends ranging from mobile applications to smartwatches to smart assistants.
Composable architectures allow digital products to be flexible and enable teams to work agilely. By working with tooling that was created to be the backbone of innovative solutions to problems, teams are able to have reliable components that match the needs of the team. One of the biggest benefits of composable architectures is that they assume that data may be relevant in several different presentation layers.
Digital experiences are no longer synonymous with web browsers. For example, an eCommerce company may have a website, mobile site, mobile app, smartwatch application, and a personal assistant skill. Avoiding content silos and making sure there is a free flow of information is crucial to building a user experience that is seamless and meets consumer expectations. Composable architectures allow all of these frontends to pull from content from a single content hub, powered by a content federation. With composable architectures, existing monolith systems are not immediately rendered useless. Instead, the valuable data stored in these systems can be fed into the new composable architecture to enrich the content hub and reduce the amount of time needed to migrate all of the data into new systems. With content federation, feeding data into the CMS becomes instantaneous.
Composable architectures are more sustainable than monoliths because of the continuous delivery of features and versions present in API-first SaaS products. Teams no longer have to rebuild their entire infrastructure every time there is a new version. Teams invest time in research and making sure the services they choose are a good fit for their use case and then can rely on these services for years to come.
With composable architectures, teams are no longer locked into a single vendor. As teams test new channels, they are able to easily add services to accommodate them. If these services are no longer useful, then they can easily remove them without disrupting other services or channels. This keeps teams flexible and ensures that teams are only paying for services that bring value.
With content federation, teams are no longer having to manually import the same data to a variety of services over and over again. Instead, the development team populates the data into the content core and then this service distributes it to the frontends and various services. This saves developers precious time and ensures that content is consistent across platforms.
Because teams no longer have to worry about architecture maintenance or migrating large sets of data to a wide range of services every time they want to try a new idea, teams are able to be experimental. Testing new channels or adding functionality is all possible with a composable architecture. Developers will be excited to take on new projects and build rather than having to spend time on architecture maintenance.
When building a composable architecture, choose the most critical systems first and begin building an MVP with them. This will help teams determine what functionality they are lacking or if there are other features needed that they did not initially anticipate. If you are building an eCommerce site, starting with the payments, PIM and CMS could be a good place to start. For a marketing site, the CMS, support, frontend software are some of the essential services.
The time spent during the planning and evaluation phase will not be lost. Understanding how services will work together can save time in the long run and help make sure that the essential elements are well chosen. The content core is the most critical here as not all CMSs are created equal. Content federation is a unique attribute that can be critical to creating a seamless composable architecture.
Tools that have a stronger community will continue to develop and evolve. They run less of a risk of petering out because of slow adoption and will continue to deliver features. Tools with strong communities will have better networks for support and problem solving should the need arise. When considering how to build sustainable composable architectures, strong community support can be a good indicator of tools sticking around for the long haul.
To explore best of breed APIs that contribute towards building resilient architectures over time, explore our curation at Build Your DXP.
Frequently Asked Questions
Content silos are pieces of data that do not communicate with other systems within the larger tech stack. In making content inaccessible to other systems, editors may have to manually re-enter data. Content silos can be a bi-product of systems not being properly connected to one another to ensure a free flow of information, or they can be intentional as a way to increase security of certain data.
Composable architectures are architectures driven by API-first products that are built modularly and light-weight. Composable architectures should make it easy to test and experiment with services without disrupting the core functionality. As team’s needs change composable architectures make it easy to adapt.
Agile workflows are project management workflows that are intended to keep teams working efficiently and productive. Agile workflows often stem from agile methodology such as Scrum or Kanban which have different approaches to breaking down a project into smaller pieces and setting broader deadlines for the modularized projects. Iteration of projects is also a key element to agile methodology.
API-first SaaS products are services that are connected to other services via API. They are specialized services that when connected together can create a powerful modular DXP. API-first systems can reduce the cost of developing apps, increase the speed to market, and enable a custom tech stack without the custom development times.
Content federation is pulling content from several sources programmatically to enrich your Hygraph data. Content federation reduces architecture complexity, removes redundant copies of data, and enriches content programmatically. With content federation, teams are able to leverage their existing services while modernizing their stacks without a large overhaul. For more on content federation, take a look at our content federation blog post.
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