Composable architecture is a technology pattern that enables organizations to build systems using modular components with standardized interfaces, such as APIs. This approach allows for rapid iteration, adaptability, and customization, making it possible to reconfigure solutions as business needs evolve. For more details, see Hygraph Blog: Composable Architecture.
What are the key guiding principles of composable architecture?
The key guiding principles of composable architecture are modularity, orchestration, and discovery. Modularity allows IT landscapes to be constructed and reassembled according to company needs. Orchestration ensures each component has distinct capabilities and can interact with other systems. Discovery enables organizations to maintain catalogs of available options for rapid solution development. Source: Hygraph Blog: Composable Architecture.
How does composable architecture prevent vendor lock-in?
Composable architecture prevents vendor lock-in by using a multicloud approach and preferring open interfaced solutions. This enables organizations to reconfigure systems in the future and arbitrage cloud providers based on price or features. Source: Hygraph Blog: Composable Architecture.
What are the benefits of adopting a composable architecture?
Adopting composable architecture allows companies to pivot and adapt quickly, achieve faster time to market, scale without being locked into a single vendor, and realize operational efficiencies. It also enables organizations to build fit-for-purpose solutions that can be reused across different contexts. Source: Hygraph Blog: Composable Architecture.
Hygraph Product Features & Capabilities
What features does Hygraph offer?
Hygraph offers a GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and a wide range of integrations. Key features include rapid content delivery, intuitive user interface, enterprise-grade security, and support for composable architectures. For more details, visit Hygraph Features.
What integrations are available with Hygraph?
Hygraph integrates with platforms such as Netlify, Vercel, BigCommerce, commercetools, Shopify, Lokalise, Crowdin, EasyTranslate, Smartling, Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot, Ninetailed, AltText.ai, Adminix, and Plasmic. For a full list, see Hygraph Integrations.
Does Hygraph provide an API?
Yes, Hygraph provides a powerful GraphQL API for efficient content management and delivery. Learn more at Hygraph API Reference.
How does Hygraph support composable architectures?
Hygraph supports composable architectures by enabling businesses to choose best-of-breed tools and integrate them seamlessly. Its API-first, GraphQL-native platform allows for modularity, flexibility, and rapid innovation. Source: Hygraph Blog: Composable Content.
Pricing & Plans
What is Hygraph's pricing model?
Hygraph offers a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans. For more details, visit the Hygraph Pricing Page.
Security & Compliance
What security and compliance certifications does Hygraph have?
Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant. It offers features such as SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments. For more details, visit Hygraph Security Features.
Use Cases & Benefits
Who can benefit from using Hygraph?
Hygraph is designed for developers, IT decision-makers, content creators, project/program managers, agencies, solution partners, and technology partners. It is ideal for modern software companies, enterprises seeking to modernize, and brands aiming to scale across geographies or improve development velocity. Source: ICPVersion2_Hailey.pdf
What business impact can customers expect from using Hygraph?
Customers can expect time-saving through streamlined workflows, ease of use with an intuitive interface, 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
What industries are represented in Hygraph's case studies?
Hygraph's case studies span industries such as Food and Beverage, Consumer Electronics, Automotive, Healthcare, Travel and Hospitality, Media and Publishing, eCommerce, SaaS, Marketplace, Education Technology, and Wellness and Fitness. For more, see Hygraph Case Studies.
Can you share specific customer success stories using Hygraph?
Yes. Komax achieved a 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 at Hygraph Customer Stories.
Pain Points & Solutions
What problems does Hygraph solve?
Hygraph addresses 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 and OpenID integration issues). Source: Hygraph Product Page.
How does Hygraph solve pain points for different personas?
For developers, Hygraph reduces boilerplate code and streamlines query management. For content creators and project managers, it offers an intuitive interface for independent content updates. For business stakeholders, it lowers operational costs and supports scalability. Solutions are tailored to each persona's needs. Source: Hygraph Product Page.
What KPIs and metrics are associated with the pain points Hygraph solves?
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. For more, see Hygraph Blog: CMS KPIs.
Technical Requirements & Documentation
Where can I find technical documentation for Hygraph?
Comprehensive technical documentation is available at Hygraph Documentation, covering everything needed to build and deploy projects.
Support & Implementation
How easy is it to get started with Hygraph?
Hygraph is designed for easy onboarding, 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. Learn more at Hygraph Documentation.
What customer support does Hygraph offer?
Hygraph provides 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users have access to documentation, video tutorials, and a community Slack channel. For more, visit Hygraph Contact Page.
What training and technical support is available to help customers get started?
Hygraph offers onboarding sessions for enterprise customers, training resources such as video tutorials, documentation, webinars, and access to Customer Success Managers for expert guidance. For more, visit Hygraph Contact Page.
Customer Proof & Case Studies
Who are some of Hygraph's customers?
Hygraph is trusted by companies such as Sennheiser, Holidaycheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. For more, see Hygraph Case Studies.
Product Performance
How does Hygraph optimize content delivery performance?
Hygraph ensures rapid content distribution and responsiveness, which improves user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. Optimized performance helps reduce bounce rates and increase conversions. For more, see Headless CMS Checklist.
Ease of Use
What feedback have customers given about Hygraph's ease of use?
Customers praise Hygraph for its intuitive interface and ease of setup. Feedback includes comments like 'super easy to set up and use' and 'even non-technical users can start using it right away.' The user interface is described as logical and user-friendly. Source: Hygraph Try Headless CMS.
Composable architecture: intro and how enterprises can benefit from it
This article examines what composable architecture is and why to use it, the components of a composable architecture for enterprises, and the steps to achieving composable architecture.
Written by Manish
on Dec 22, 2022
Composable architecture refers to a technology architecture pattern that allows for maximizing the different configurations of technology solutions by mandating that each component in the system have standardized interfaces, namely APIs. The benefit of this solution pattern is that it allows for rapid iteration in volatile business environments.
Composable architecture has been applied in many different domains from networks with cloud APIs to application backends with microservices and is now increasingly one of the most popularly prescribed patterns in CMS technologies.
This article examines what composable architecture is and why to use it, the components of a composable architecture for enterprises, and the steps to achieving composable architecture.
#What Is composable architecture and why to use it
The most apt analogy for composable architecture is the popular children’s toys by Meccano. Since each piece of the toy is built from similar machine pieces of metal, they can be joined in different configurations to make anything from a crane to a helicopter with the same set of pieces.
Adaptability and customization are the key advantages of this solution pattern. Instead of tools forcing users to adapt their workflows to its design, customers these days expect tools to be adaptable to work within their workflows. In the ever increasing digital-first world of the enterprises that will succeed in the future, the most adaptable methodology will be the most valuable since it can adjust to the needs of the constant change of business environments.
Following composable architecture means building an ecosystem of elements that can work together in different ways to create a fit-for-purpose solution that's scalable with enterprise workloads. For enterprises, this means investing in capabilities that will let them unlock the scale and flexibility that composability can provide, such as being able to use the same CMS for marketing web content and internal knowledge management. However, this investment is offset by the cost savings of operational efficiencies since composable architecture allows resources to be spun up in near real time.
In the past, a common approach was to use a monolithic architecture with all applications running on one machine. This is still viable, but if you're interested in developing more advanced composable architectures, you should think about treating each application as though it were its own component. This approach lets an application be controlled by code with APIs and then distributed to suit the real-time computing, storage, and processing demands of your company without disrupting other apps that are already running.
Infrastructure automation
As more workloads move away from private data centers to public clouds, they require skilled practitioners with automation-first mindsets to tear down and build up new infrastructure stacks. According to composable architecture, enterprises must be able to have reliable provisioning steps that let developers build the tech environment they need in real time via automation.
Empowering internal teams like this also means the core components of cloud (storage, identity, compute, network, and so on) must be thought of as separate applications. These can then be creatively packaged into solutions that orchestrate various solution elements (databases, application servers, caches) for rapid delivery at relatively low support costs.
As shows in the diagram above, some of the key enablers of this pattern are trends like container technology, container orchestration, gateways, firewalls, load balancers, and other network elements to join the solution elements and make them available on demand .
Multicloud strategy
According to composable enterprise, IT enterprises must divide workloads using a multicloud approach. Because different cloud providers have different strengths and cost structures, a multicloud approach lets the composable cloud be arbitraged on price and/or features. It also ensures that cloud providers are unable to apply vendor lock-in. It prefers open interfaced solutions that retains the option of future reconfigurations.
However, increased DevOps and security practices are needed for multicloud management. Applications, services, and workloads may be scaled across various data center components and managed as private clouds.
Software that's reliant on several clouds makes the work of DevOps specialists more challenging. DevOps have to focus more on adapting to the evolving technologies that underpin these cloud platforms and responding to them to ensure that their own software is using them to their fullest potential.
Engaging in composable architecture has four main stages.
Understand the ecosystem
The first step towards a composable architecture, understanding the ecosystem, is mainly the remit of enterprise architects.
Enterprise architects must make an inventory of capabilities, technologies, and procedures that have been developed through an organization’s lifecycle. It's provided by artifacts like capability maps, process inventories, customer journey maps, and application inventories.
Such an inventory provides an understanding of the organization's current operations and the clients' needs as well as the maturity levels of the solution elements and their current levels of composability.
Identifying the need for composability
The next stage is to determine the scope and evaluate the necessity for composability. In the real world, costs and resources must be weighed up against technical excellence. This stage is about comprehending the requirements for composability.
Business analysts and solution analysts working with the enterprise architects use the inventory artifacts such as capabilities, processes, customer journeys, and value streams from the previous stages to determine where the improved efficiency and shorter time to market of composability is most valuable. For workloads with high transaction rates, the highest priority might be the storage or networking layer. In organizations with higher marketing spend, it might be the digital marketing stack.
The limiting factors for your organization will typically be well-known since they are likely where stability challenges have been observed.
Architect
Coming from an awareness of where composability needs are highest based on client demands, the third stage is to make decisions on what to focus on.
Since market demands should guide these decisions, business architects play an important role to understand how strategy should be made into reality. The business capability map and how it relates to IT and business processes is a crucial component of this stage.
In turn, IT architects use the business capability map to establish a collection of autonomous components that provide distinct business value. Each of these components must function as a separate island of expertise that can be configured for various use cases with slight configuration changes rather than full scale re-engineering. This allows for specializing at the component level. More critically, standardized interfaces means the existing solutions can adopt the next versions in their own time. Decoupling the various components allows for independent architecture evolution and is a key strength of composable architectures.
In this phase, architects must apply key guiding principles such as modularity, orchestration, and discovery to ensure the vision of composable architecture can be achieved.
Modularity refers to the ability to construct and reassemble the IT landscape according to company needs. Because of modularity, mature architecture teams are interested in the freedom that cloud services offer since it makes it easier to respond rapidly to market demands. They understand that cloud services let a company achieve a high level of flexibility that's hard to match with traditional and private IT architectures such as on-premise or on-site.
Orchestration means each component of the system has distinct capabilities that are reflected in services and is able to go from input of one system to feeding another process. This is enabled by control processes that ensure each step is carefully completed before moving on to the next.
Enterprises with a lack of oversight can lack solutions that can be independently rebuilt by another part of the organization. It results in a tremendous waste of capital and unnecessary delay in delivery. Keeping an up-to-date catalog of available options allows solution elements and components to be discovered.
Build and repeat
During the fourth stage, the pieces are put together. It's important to remember that APIs should be the connecting thread that holds everything together and to consider the business side of the components. The aim is to provide the business with solutions based on reusable parts that can be repeated in various contexts at a speed that allows for value maximization within the enterprise.
In reality, organizational headwinds will often steer towards reversion of non-composable solutions. These needs will need to be discussed and balanced with the composable engine that's being built. Organizational friction will be likely, and strong leadership will be required to stick to the composable architecture and to co-develop designs that follow the foundational composable strategy.
This article described the key features and components of a composable architecture and why enterprises should use it. It also described the practical steps an organization can take towards a composable architecture.
Modern enterprises create, structure and distribute a huge amount of content in many different channels. Hygraph provides an encapsulation layer for all forms of content allowing it to be unified and enriched, making it easy to create digital media products, do knowledge management and catalog experiences. With best-in-class utilization of GraphQL API backed up with industry-leading uptime, it guarantees your backend will never be the bottleneck for your organization.
Blog Author
Manish Pahwa
Manish is the co-founder and CTO of StackGo and a passionate advocate for creating seamless customer journey powered by integrated SaaS tools. With over 10 years of experience in various tech roles, he brings a level headed and calm leadership approach that is able to see through both the technical and business oriented prisms to enable tech and product teams to flourish.
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