.webp)
Build your first embedded data product now. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.
The future of business is composable. According to Gartner, more and more businesses build their organizations using independent components that can be swapped as needed. Organizations are now embracing a composable enterprise architecture where flexibility is paramount. Everything—from product offerings that no longer fit market needs to technologies that have outlived their usefulness—can be replaced seamlessly.
But what does composability mean for SaaS products? In this article, you'll learn what composable architecture is and how this approach can help you scale your SaaS business quicker by leveraging composable infrastructure and composable technologies that work in harmony with your operational goals.
Imagine composable architecture as Lego blocks for developers. With these packaged business capabilities, you can combine traditional architecture elements with innovative approaches, leaving behind the constraints of monolithic systems. This is the heart of the composable approach – allowing you to build composable commerce platforms that integrate seamlessly with cloud services for a truly modern experience.
It's not to be mistaken with The Composable Architecture (TCA), a well-known example of this approach, developed by Point-free. TCA is a framework for Swift – a programming language for Apple app development (iOS) – and comes with a library of tools to build modular, testable applications.
In this article, however, we will focus on composable architecture as a wider software development movement.
Composable architecture is a new way to do software design. In this method, developers use modular architecture techniques to break down an existing architecture into smaller, manageable units that are easier to update and scale. When you implement composable architecture, you immediately notice that composable architecture makes it possible to swiftly adjust to changing market demands. This flexibility opens up digital channels for innovation and enables teams to create composable architectures that meet diverse business needs.
A modern, modern digital team supported by agile practices builds a composable system where every piece works independently yet cohesively. This method can help you scale resources developers partners efficiently and reuse existing components across projects. It’s worth asking how composable architectures truly work, since breaking your software into independent modules is the secret sauce that distinguishes them and shows composable architectures differ from rigid legacy systems.
For many modern-day software builders, the old ways are proving too restrictive. In a world where updating one component might mean overhauling an entire traditional digital experience stacks, developers seek a better way.
The MACH principles—Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless – are designed to automate digital operations and let you satisfy unique programming language requirements in a flexible environment.
These are small, self-contained services (or composable architecture bmi group components) that embody promoting functional programming principles. Each microservice is responsible for a distinct business function, and together, they ensure that composable architecture expands your development potential.
Here, the API is not an afterthought but is composable architecture outlined from the start, allowing for robust, clear communication between parts of the system, despite external and internal forces that might otherwise cause friction.
Building your product on a contentful composable content platform ensures that each element of the whole system is scalable, offering superior localization and personalization efforts across multiple channels.
Decoupling the front-end from the back-end means you are leveraging a cloud native platform that demonstrates composable architecture vs the old tightly coupled designs. This layer acts as an orchestration layer makes tools more effective in building software systems that avoid redundant or unnecessary tasks and prevent resource hungry integration processes.
Organizations using composable architecture have reported significant time savings in development and maintenance. The benefits include:
Although composability has many advantages, it comes with some challenging side effects as well. If you're considering a modular approach to building apps, here are the most common pitfalls to watch out for.
Shopify uses composable architecture to deliver a highly customizable e-commerce platform. Integrating microservices and APIs, Shopify enables merchants to tailor their online stores with modular components, such as payment gateways, inventory management, and advanced analytics. To maximize earnings on Shopify, you can just grab one of the many existing plugins and components in their marketplace.
This flexibility allows Shopify to continuously roll out new features and integrate with third-party services, giving merchants full control over their store’s tech stack while maintaining scalability and adaptability.
Netflix relies on composable architecture to efficiently manage its large user base and streaming infrastructure. Through the use of microservices, each responsible for specific business capabilities like user authentication, data monetization, content recommendations, and video streaming, Netflix can independently scale and optimize different parts of its platform.
This architecture allows Netflix to deploy updates rapidly and ensure better user experience without affecting the overall system's performance, enhancing both scalability and resilience in managing global demand.
Peloton, known for its connected fitness products, leverages composable architecture to deliver a seamless, personalized workout experience.
By integrating various APIs, microservices, and modular components, Peloton ensures that different parts of its platform – such as live streaming, user profiles, leaderboards, and subscription management – can evolve independently.
This allows Peloton to quickly roll out new features and update specific parts of their service without disrupting the entire platform. The modular design enables Peloton to maintain high scalability while adapting to its users' growing demands for personalization and interactivity.
Spotify utilizes composable architecture to provide a seamless and personalized music streaming experience to its global user base. Spotify decouples key functionalities such as music recommendations, user playlists, and real-time streaming.
Each module operates independently, allowing Spotify to quickly introduce new features like personalized playlists or podcast integration without affecting other parts of the platform.
This modular approach not only enhances scalability but also ensures a consistent user experience across different devices and operating systems. With composable architecture, Spotify can maintain agile product development cycles while keeping its backend flexible and efficient.
With a composable architecture, it becomes easier to add new functionalities that aren’t necessarily core to your platform. However, these add-on functions can be a huge value-add for your customers, leading to higher satisfaction, more expansion revenue, and a higher LTV.
Especially with powerful low-code software that exists today, you can simply plug in new building blocks in days, instead of months. Below, you’ll find 5 examples that fit perfectly into a composable stack.
Auth0 is a drop-in solution for authentication and authorization for web apps. You can manage social logins, single sign-on, multi-factor authentication and more, all from a central dashboard.
It integrates seamlessly with your existing stack, allowing your DevOps team to maintain security best practices without building a custom solution.
Luzmo redefines what an embedded analytics platform can be by empowering you to create a truly composable data experience. With Luzmo Flex, you can build entirely new data experiences that adhere 100% to the composable architecture philosophy. Imagine integrating charts that are not only visually stunning but also interact seamlessly with individual components of your application, thanks to its robust application programming interface. These charts are fully customizable; they can be styled, tweaked, and adjusted to meet your precise needs, ensuring they blend harmoniously with the entire system.
Complementing Luzmo Flex is Luzmo IQ, an AI-powered layer for data analysis that brings a more intuitive experience directly into your composable app. By integrating Luzmo IQ, you gain access to advanced data insights that harness the power of AI while preserving your preferred language models and interfaces. This means you can effortlessly incorporate independent services into your workflow, creating a dynamic environment where reusable components work in tandem to enhance decision-making. Luzmo IQ transforms raw data into actionable insights, ensuring that your composable software ecosystem remains agile and ahead of the curve.
You can even embed a full BI interface so that customers can mine insights according to their specific needs.
Contentstack is a headless CMS, which fits perfectly with the idea of composable architecture. Contentstack takes care of content creation, storage, and delivery via API. But how you present that content is completely up to you and your development team! Use any front-end technology you like to integrate content where and how you want.
Algolia is a cloud-based tool for adding search functions to websites and SaaS applications, without having to build it from scratch. It’s a modular component that integrates seamlessly into any tech stack and scales independently as you need more (or less) search functionality.
Twilio lets you add communication capabilities directly into any software application without building them from the ground up.
Whether you need a chatbot, or send 2FA passcodes, or notifications via SMS and other channels, Twilio takes care of your communication across the entire customer journey. And it comes with plenty of automation options too.
Composable systems were built for flexibility—AI is making them unstoppable.
With AI-driven components, SaaS companies are not just assembling software; they’re crafting intelligent, self-evolving ecosystems that anticipate user needs and optimize experiences in real time. For example, integrating AI can help you reuse existing components and create composable architectures that evolve with market demands.
AI is breaking down the barriers to innovation—what once took months now takes days.
By adding AI-powered capabilities, you can enable predictive analytics that automatically adjust system behavior based on real-time data. AI can also power customizable, AI-powered interfaces – such as chatbots or intelligent analytics assistants—that drive faster decision-making and help automate digital operations across multiple channels.
AI is a necessity for companies striving to stay ahead. As AI integration continues, it will help scale resources by enabling seamless updates, smarter workflows, and ultimately a scalable digital approach that transforms the entire digital architecture.
The future belongs to those who embrace AI to replace outdated tools and deliver a composable enterprise architecture that adapts to both external and internal forces.
SaaS builders who are using a composable architecture are speeding up their product development drastically. Instead of spending months on developing an add-on, they go live with new features in days by using plug-and-play building blocks.
If you're looking to add interactive analytics in record time, consider Luzmo for seamless integration into your tech stack. Get in touch with our product experts to see how our composable analytics can enhance your SaaS offering. Or better yet – start a free 10-day trial and experience it firsthand!
A monolithic architecture is a traditional model where all components are interlinked and dependent on a single codebase. In contrast, composable architecture breaks down the application into independent, self-contained modules, enhancing adaptability and scalability.
Composable architecture allows SaaS companies to develop and deploy new features faster, improve scalability, and provide a better user experience by enabling tailored solutions. It also reduces time to market and enhances the ability to respond to changing market demands.
Challenges include increased complexity in managing multiple services, the need for robust API management to ensure seamless integrations, a potential learning curve for development teams, and the necessity for reliable connectivity between modules.
Microservices are the building blocks of composable architecture. Each microservice represents a specific business capability and operates independently. This modularity allows for greater flexibility and scalability within the application.
Build your first embedded data product now. Talk to our product experts for a guided demo or get your hands dirty with a free 10-day trial.
