What is this about?
“Composable Architecture” is not a new idea, but the term has become much more visible again in the context of DXP, headless CMS, MACH, and modern platform engineering.
At its core, composable architecture is about building systems from capabilities that can be combined, replaced, and evolved independently. That sounds simple, but it changes how we think about teams, integration, product ownership, and long-term system evolution.
This article is my attempt to separate the useful architectural idea from the marketing vocabulary around it. It seems that term “Composable Architecture” can be attributed to Jonathan Murray and was described in Composable Enterprise. This is already more than a decade old.
The term Composable Architecture specifically started to cross my feed reader often for some reason. So Let’s explore what it all means today.
Where DXP fits in
DXP, or Digital Experience Platform, describes the business-facing problem space: organizations want to deliver consistent digital experiences across websites, apps, portals, commerce, and other touchpoints.
In that sense, DXP is less an architecture pattern and more the target domain. It describes what the business wants to achieve. Composable Architecture describes one way to structure the underlying system so that this complexity remains manageable.
Term DXP was introduced to reflect the evolving needs of modern digital content management and customer experience. Gartner redefined the landscape by transitioning from their traditional Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management to the broader and more comprehensive Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms
A DXP is an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery, and optimization of contextualized digital experiences across multiple channels and devices.
Those folks speaking about “Architecture” in this context. Thus DXPs architecture is designed to provide consistent and personalized digital interactions, facilitating a seamless experience for users across various touch points such as websites, mobile apps, and social media platforms. Sounds like a lot of complexity to tackle in DXPs. We need an engineering strategy that supports it well. So I’d like to the treat term DXP as the description of the target system from the customers perspective.
Composable Architecture
To build great products and DXPs, organizations strive to stay competitive in an ever-evolving digital world. So, composable architecture emerges as a powerful strategy for building resilient, future-proof applications. I’m using the word strategy consciously here. Strategy is more inclusive, it not only focuses on the technical aspects of the future system, it rather describes a shared and inclusive strategy on how an organization gets to a resilient and future proof system. This strategy might include organization/team building activities, product strategies, UX/design sub-strategies, platform team’s strategy, maybe even sales and marketing and more. If you are not following me on that one, at least you should agree, that this is easier to create as common language with different (non technical) roles by putting it this way rather than using engineers language.
However we can stay technically in this article and give this discussion more depth by defining composability.
Composability
According to wikipedia, Composability is a system design principle that deals with the inter-relationships of components. A highly composable system provides components that can be selected and assembled in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements.
In the given context we should expect the following properties:
- Modularity: Systems are divided into distinct modules or services, each responsible for a specific piece of functionality. These modules can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently.
- Interoperability: Ease of integration (Plug in) of new components,applications (technically and logically). Components are designed to work together seamlessly, often through well-defined APIs.
- Reusability: The ability to use a component in multiple applications
- Scalability: Each component can be scaled independently based on demand, improving resource utilization and system performance.
- Flexibility: Composable architecture allows for easier updates and modifications. New functionalities can be added by integrating new modules without significant changes to the existing system.
If we are able to build such systems we can expect all the benefits, like agility (Organizations can respond more quickly to changes in market demands or technological advancements) and efficiency (Development teams can focus on building specific components, leveraging existing modules).
Both Microservice Architecture and Headless CMS exemplify the principles of composable architecture through their emphasis on modularity, flexibility, scalability, and interoperability. By breaking down systems into smaller, manageable components that can be independently developed and maintained, they enable organizations to build more resilient, adaptive, and future-proof solutions.
MACH Architecture
MACH is a more specific and opinionated interpretation of composable architecture.
The acronym stands for:
- Microservices
- API-first
- Cloud-native
- Headless
Where “Composable Architecture” describes the general strategy, MACH describes a concrete set of technology principles often used in digital commerce and DXP environments.
I would not say that every composable system must be MACH. But many MACH systems are attempts to make composability practical at enterprise scale.
Headless CMS
In the simplest terms, headless is a system with a decoupled back-end and front-end. Nowadays Headless CMS would typically mean:
- API-First Approach: Headless CMS platforms prioritize API-based content delivery. Content is made available via RESTful APIs or GraphQL.
- Frontend Agnostic: Unlike traditional CMS platforms that are often tied to a specific front-end template or rendering engine. Any front-end framework or language, such as React, Vue, Angular, Jamstack or static site generators like Hugo can be used.
- Content as a Service (CaaS): Basically means the content can be accessed programmatically via API.
Composable architecture aligns well with Headless CMS, and the two terms are often used together.
Cloud Native
Cloud Native refers to designing, building, and running applications optimized for cloud environments. Key aspects include:
- Microservices Architecture: Independent, modular services.
- Containers: Encapsulate applications for consistent environments.
- DevOps and CI/CD: Automate testing and deployment for frequent, reliable releases.
- Dynamic Orchestration: Tools like Kubernetes manage container deployment and scaling.
- Resilience and Scalability: Built-in fault tolerance and horizontal scaling.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Automate infrastructure provisioning and management.
- APIs and Service Mesh: Manage service communication and enhance security.
- Observability: Robust monitoring and logging for visibility and issue resolution.