Composable Platforms Are Promising, but Not a Silver Bullet
Platform engineering has emerged as a way to manage DevOps workflows at scale. But like every new technology, the monolithic approach to platform development comes with inherent limitations.
Most internal developer platforms (IDPs) struggle with siloed functionalities, cumbersome toolchains and ever-expanding infrastructure that reveal their lack of flexibility.
Composable architecture is a significant shift away from the rigid architectural designs of the past. Its inherently modular nature makes it an ideal building block in modern platform engineering. Research by Gartner in 2022 predicted that combining composability with a holistic hyperautomation approach could trigger a 40% reduction in individual initiative costs by 2024.
This transition toward composable platforms — whether deployed in private, hybrid or multicloud environments — promises to empower enterprises to leverage the investment of their existing technologies. This presents an alternative and innovative way to tackle the challenges of traditional platform development, and raises a critical question: Could composable, self-servicing platforms be the silver bullet for platform engineering?
Let’s dive into the following:
- The role of composability in platform engineering
- The limitations of traditional platforms
- The promise of composable platforms
- How composability powers platform engineering
Why the Traditional Approach Needs To Go
Traditional platform engineering offers a one-size-fits-all approach to improving developer experience through an internal developer platform, which provides businesses with a prebuilt set of tools and services for automating tasks and enabling self-service.
However, these IDPs are composed of several components and, at their core, are a developer portal, a platform orchestrator and a DevOps platform. Infrastructure management is often included as well, and sometimes it is the main component. When an organization purchases these prepackaged IDPs from a vendor, they are often stuck with the components the vendor provides, which sometimes are unnecessary features — extra baggage that weighs down the system.
Some common limitations developers and engineering teams face with these big non-composable IDPs include:
- Generic services: Creating a balance between the demands of particular teams and the necessity for broadly applicable services can be difficult. Platform teams often create generic services that can be adopted by all teams within any organization. While this approach promotes wider adoption, it can remove the specialized features that some teams rely on for their specific tasks.
- Change one, change all: Due to the interconnected nature of platform services, upgrades require careful consideration of several factors, including dependencies and configurations.
- Scale: Most platform tools are not built to handle fluctuations in user traffic as the platform grows or as user demands rise without compromising performance.
- Disaster radius: Disasters are inevitable even for platform tools. However, some IDPs do not have provisions for optimal disaster containment. So when a disaster occurs, it could affect all the services running on top of that platform.
- Extending to region: Expanding to new regions can be slow and complex for some platform solutions. It often takes significant time and effort to install, integrate and manage various components before deployment. This often results in delays in creating new regional clusters or environments.
- Limited experimentation: Integrating new tools, especially intrusive ones like security scanners or service meshes, can be challenging to integrate without disrupting existing systems.
How Does Composability Address These Problems?
Composable platforms are a new way of thinking about platforms that allow teams to integrate various components and tailor each to their needs. Instead of offering everything as a pre-running service, platform teams can create installable packages for most of the components. These building blocks are like miniplatforms that can be combined to create a customized solution. For example, you can start by building your infrastructure platform because it’s your main problem, then add the DevOps platform and the rest. This way, your IDP evolves alongside your business.
What Are the Advantages of Adopting a Composable Approach?
Composability in IDPs promises to address some of these limitations by introducing the following benefits:
- Modular architecture: Composability in platforms is provided by a library of loosely coupled systems and services that are customizable to meet your product needs. The idea is to break down each platform’s functionalities into well-defined, independent components. The modular approach of these composable platforms means platform tools can be updated, replaced or expanded upon with minimal disruption to the entire system. This ensures companies stay ahead of the curve with the latest platform capabilities.
- Standardized interface: Composable platforms promise a Lego-like approach to infrastructure, allowing you to effortlessly connect existing services and tools (whether in private, hybrid or multicloud environments). Composable architecture design accommodates seamless integration and communication between cutting-edge platform services and tools. Engineering and developer teams no longer need to be confined to the limited compatibility of traditional platforms.
- Scalability, flexibility and performance: Composable platforms, built from interchangeable components, promise scalability. They allow you to dynamically scale resources (e.g., processing power, storage) up or down based on real-time demands. Platform engineering teams can easily integrate custom components or third-party services through customizable assembly and open integration standards. Using prebuilt, optimized components and composable platforms can ensure each tool is well-designed and performs efficiently.
How Can Composability Power Success in Platform Engineering?
Tools like Mia-Platform Console offer a unified developer hub to centralize project governance, and streamline and automate DevOps processes. The platform provides a marketplace filled with prebuilt templates and plug-ins that teams can integrate into their IDP.
While composability offers many advantages for platform tools, it’s not a perfect solution in all situations. Distributed platforms built with this approach can have drawbacks that you should know about before diving in. These include:
- Increased management complexity: Computing resources in these environments are more spread out, which could complicate management processes. As a result, engaging in tasks such as disaster recovery, troubleshooting or security may require extra effort, particularly if the tasks involve contextualized environments that weren’t initially integrated.
- Higher overall resource consumption: When multiple teams run more instances than necessary, the platform faces the risk of overloading resources. Some platform tools may need help managing excessive distribution, potentially leading to resource consumption issues down the line.
Can Composable Platforms Be Considered a ‘Silver Bullet’?
Complete composability in IDPs can significantly foster success among platform engineering teams. Here’s how:
- Bespoke tooling: Composability allows users to tailor the platform to their specific needs by selecting and combining only the relevant components. This level of customization enhances user satisfaction and engagement, as users can create personalized workflows and experiences that align with their preferences and requirements.
- Contained volatility: When a platform is built with composable components, changes or updates to one component can be isolated from others. This containment helps to manage risk and reduces the chance of regressions during development.
- Reduced blast radius: When outages occur in these platforms, they can be contained within the specific component that is experiencing the issue. For instance, a DNS outage wouldn’t affect other services running on separate clusters. This minimizes downtime and simplifies troubleshooting.
- Openness to experimentation: The isolated nature of composable platforms makes it easier for teams to experiment with different configurations and functionalities when building bespoke tools. Teams can iterate quickly and refine their tools without affecting the core platform.
- Contained platform upgrades: With composable platforms, upgrades can become manageable when dealing with smaller, independent components compared to the monolithic nature of traditional platform tools. Less context switching and fewer dependencies are needed to streamline the upgrade process.
Summing Up
Composable platforms are powerful solutions that will likely play a crucial role for many businesses that require a high degree of customization and agility. However, the concepts of composability and platform engineering are still new and evolving. It’s important to remember that platform tools aim to empower developers with grab-and-go capabilities. So if frequent removal and addition of components become the norm, it could counter the entire idea of platform tools streamlining development processes.
Overall, composable platforms are a promising approach, but they are still evolving concepts. We can’t consider them a silver bullet for software development.
