Making the Move to Composable

Chris Bach

Hey everyone! How are you doing? Super awesome to be here. I'm so excited. Our first topic, of course, is Jamstack. We did Jamstack for a number of years. This is all about how composable architecture has really arrived, what it looks like when it arrives in enterprises, and what stays the same.

So, a quick introduction to me. I'm Chris. I spend all my time on composable architecture, on Jamstack, on the decoupling of the web. I sit on several advisory and executive boards in our ecosystem, including the MACH Alliance, where Netlify helped create the enabler category. I also spend a lot of time on how should the approach be to educate the market. I'm also involved in angel investments in the ecosystem, pushing it forward. Before this, I spent 15 years in agencies, struggling with various challenges that we collectively, at Netlify and everyone here, are trying to solve.

By the way, I do love old movies and modern jazz. My path here was through studying film history, which is, of course, not super relevant, but it's still fun. However, we're here to talk about composable architecture as a digital strategy.

When we started Netlify, the notion was to decouple the web. There were several reasons for that. It enabled multiple points of origin, scalability, speed, security, and gave developers superpowers. It was a fundamental shift in how we built for the web. However, it was challenging to achieve because there was no viable ecosystem.

Today, that has fundamentally changed. The Netlify Composable Web Platform focuses on the ecosystem, which includes more than 3,500 companies, including existing legacy providers that have modernized themselves. The viable workflows have been solidified, and we can support complex use cases. There's a significant appetite for composable architecture among enterprises.

Enterprises are adopting composable architecture for various reasons. The main one is a faster time to market. In today's digital landscape, business problems often have digital solutions, and waiting for months due to monolithic systems is no longer acceptable. Reducing operational overhead and achieving interchangeability are also critical factors. The ability to have specialized systems that work together is more efficient than a monolithic solution.

Some companies struggle to realize the promises of composable architecture. Reasons include proliferation, being sold monolithic solutions under the guise of composable, and more. But more than 90% of the time, the challenges are similar.

To realize the promises of composable architecture, we need to focus on the architecture itself. It's not just about choosing the right headless components. We must consider how we orchestrate, operate, maintain, publish, and abstract these components into code.

Traditional publishing involves multiple steps, each with separate stakeholders and ticketing systems. This process can create significant delays and dependencies

The next step in cloud evolution is moving towards platforms that abstract and automate traditional infrastructure and operations, making them part of the development process. AI plays a role in this by abstracting and automating what used to be manual tasks.

Continuous everything is a philosophy that promotes real-time feedback, code quality, monitoring, security scanning, and staging environments as part of the development process. This approach significantly reduces the time-to-market and operational overhead.

As enterprises adopt composable architecture, they need to consider how to incorporate existing tech stacks without disrupting their operations overnight. The focus should be on optimizing and providing the right workflows to facilitate gradual migration.

In conclusion, adopt composable solutions, reduce time-to-market and operational overhead, and implement continuous everything. These principles will help you embrace the benefits of composable architecture and stay competitive.

Thank you for being part of this journey, to our fantastic partners, clients, and everyone at Netlify. It's a pleasure to be here.