Moving fast and smart: adopting a modern, agile architecture
eCommerce technologists know what it's like to run the hamster wheel of replatforming. Several years ago, you overhauled your entire technology stack. At the time, it was cutting-edge, but as your needs shifted, your once-shiny platform has since lost its glimmer. And so, you begin the lengthy process of migrating to a new platform — knowing that, in just a few short years, you'll be in the exact same position.
Here's the good news: the industry is starting to move towards a new, agile model that for many eCommerce brands is nothing short of a game-changer.
Instead of depending upon a monolithic application structure, which can't be easily changed and ties you into an inevitable rip-and-replace cycle, your platform is broken up into several discrete parts: a front-end, an API layer to facilitate communication, and the various backend services you rely upon to provide specific functionality.
The advantage of this approach is that it gives you the flexibility to choose the right technology for your needs. If you want to upgrade your website's search functionality, for example, you don't need to deploy an entirely new eCommerce platform. You just switch that one part. Likewise, if you want to expand your capabilities, you don't need to upgrade your entire tech stack. You can just build or buy the functionality you need and connect it to your API layer.
A Composable Architecture is a great way to accelerate your developer agility, reduce technical debt, and wrestle back control of your tech stack. But it's also something that needs to be approached with a level of consideration, planning, and careful thought. And, in some cases, with the help and guidance of an expert. Here's why.
Establishing strong foundations
Pete Youell, SQLI’s CTO, explained that one of the biggest challenges experienced by those migrating from a monolithic eCommerce stack to a platform built around composable patterns is the change of thinking it entails.
With the old monolithic approach, developers built everything on top of a single platform or framework, where all components were preconnected. A modern architecture, often refered to as ‘Composable’, meanwhile, requires you to think about how several independent components would communicate through an API layer.
"Things like investing in a flexible API layer are so important because it means you can make better design decisions going forward. Having a flexible API layer makes it easy to decouple components, and split these components into smaller, manageable chunks so they're not all tangled, as is often the case with a monolithic design," explained Pete.
"Fundamentally, getting this right means that — a few years down the line — you don't encounter a whole bunch of tech debt. You're not constantly messing with sticking plasters you added a few years back to solve a particular problem, that now get in the way," he added.
Pete explained that, because the composable architecture is fundamentally different, it requires teams to adopt new approaches to problem-solving.
"If you've never built a modern, API-driven app before, it's hard to know what APIs are needed, and where. It's difficult to decide where to implement customisations, how to build a micro-service, and how to design your front end," he said.
"Composable apps force you to think about problems you perhaps didn't need to before — like how to keep the front end behaving like a front end, and not adding business logic that doesn't need to be there, and how ensure the whole application is secure across all the different components and services. If you're coming to this completely fresh, it can feel daunting," Pete added.
Composable apps force you to think about problems you perhaps didn't need to before — like how to keep the front end behaving like a front end, and not adding business logic that doesn't need to be there, and how ensure the whole application is secure across all the different components and services.
Modernising your App and your culture
Moving to a composable architecture gives you an incredible amount of developer flexibility, but it also demands that you — and your team — be flexible too.
"The move to composable requires you to embrace different mindsets and internal structures," said Pete, adding that from the first steps towards realising your ambition, you've already radically changed how you build software.
"After the first phase of this transition, you have a very different technology stack than what you had before."
While this sounds daunting, there's some good news. Change often provokes resistance, but in the case of migrating to composable, it rarely comes from developers themselves.
As Marc Ludwig, Lead Commerce Consultant at SQLI UK and Middle East explained: "Composable is a wildly different approach, and you might expect some developers — those who have invested a decade or more of their career around a particular platform — to feel uncomfortable with change."
"But we've found that it's a great way to retain and attract new technical talent," said Pete. "If you're a developer that's been working on the same thing for 8 or ten years, you'll likely be eager to play with something new. To learn new skills."
And for those skeptics, it's easy to make the case that a shift to composable, while perhaps be a little jarring at first, is an essential step to putting the business on a strong technical footing for the future.
Getting the right help
The composable architecture is a great way to build an agile, responsive technology stack that addresses the requirements of today, and can change to meet the needs of the future. But it's not without its complexity, requiring developers and architects to make smart decisions from the very beginning.
And if your team hasn't been exposed to composable design patterns previously, they may not know whether they're making the right decisions or not.
"If you've got an engineer that's built monolithic applications their entire life, and you're now introducing them to this brand-new way of building software, it's not fair to expect they can just pivot and not make any mistakes," said Pete.
"Ultimately, it's a big leap in how things are done. A modern, composable architecture is different, and it's often helpful to bring in an expert to guide you through your journey," he added.
If you're in that position, you’re going to want to keep an eye on our blog. Over the coming weeks, we’re going to take a deep dive into how this modern framework works, the cultural and technical aspects of each tier, and how to unlock functionality that you perhaps once believed to be out of reach.
And if that doesn’t satisfy your interest, reach out to SQLI's experts. Our experience building modern architecture systems has allowed us to codify our expertise in the SQLI Composable Accelerator.
This approach is designed to ensure fast momentum as you shift to this new architecture, while also providing guiderails and designs that reduce technical debt and future headaches.
