Why You Need Composable Process Automation

Does your automation architecture limit how quickly you can change your business processes? Do you find that you’re bending processes to fit the tools you have, instead of using tools to achieve your business goals? If so, you need composable architecture, which is a modular approach to automation architecture and development.

What is composable architecture?

Composable architecture combines the principles of modularity, autonomy, orchestration, and discovery to ensure a flexible and resilient technical foundation that’s future-proof and that enables organizations to quickly capitalize on business opportunities as they arise.

Instead of relying on monolithic software products or a rigid infrastructure with many brittle dependencies, composable architecture encourages the use and reuse of interchangeable, interoperable components that you can easily assemble, reconfigure, and scale according to your business needs.

Composable architecture allows you to select and integrate best-of-breed tools, technologies, and services, so you can ensure that your process automation architecture precisely fits your business use case—instead of constantly compromising because of technology limitations.

Benefits of composable architecture

Composable architecture is flexible. Flexibility is the core benefit of composable architecture and truly underlines all other benefits. With a composable architecture, you can adapt to changing business needs and technical requirements without overhauling your entire tech stack. Instead, you add, remove, and swap individual tools or services as needed.

Composable architecture enables agility. Flexibility and agility go hand-in-hand. Many organizations deal with competitors launching new products and rolling out promotional offers; market disruptors that are delivering new features lightning-fast; and changing regulatory requirements that require compliance on a specific timeline. You need to be able to adapt in a matter of days or weeks, not months or years.

Composable architecture can help you manage costs. By leveraging reusable components, you can reduce development and maintenance costs. Composable architecture is well-suited for the integration of reusable components and out-of-the-box solutions. As with any architecture, you need a strategy and you need to keep an eye on costs (especially when it comes to consumption-based SaaS services); but composable architecture provides much more granular visibility into costs than you get with a monolithic solution.

Composable architecture helps you prepare for the future. Technology evolves rapidly; just look at the growing popularity of generative AI in business processes. Composable architecture allows you to more easily experiment with new products and services, and make them part of your full tech stack after they prove their worth. Future-proofing your business is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge in the world of digital business.

Camunda and composability in the hyperautomation stack

Composability is a must for a hyperautomation tech stack because hyperautomation is all about combining tools, technologies, and systems to automate as much of the business as possible. Taking a composable approach to hyperautomation unlocks the benefits described above: from flexibility and agility to cost management and future-proofing of your automation efforts.

While process automation is only one piece of the hyperautomation puzzle, it’s a big one. At Camunda, we see processes as the algorithms that determine how an organization runs—which means they’re intrinsically connected to everything that an organization does to achieve hyperautomation. That’s why composability has always been a guiding principle for our product design.

Camunda is a composable process orchestration solution that’s integrated, yet flexible. That means the platform has an open architecture made up of an integrated set of components that work together seamlessly, but that can also operate independently if needed. This open architecture facilitates composability in a way that black-box monoliths don’t, because it makes it easy to integrate process orchestration capabilities into a hyperautomation tech stack instead of operating outside of the stack.

In addition, reusability is an important aspect of composable architecture. Camunda Connectors are a prime example of reusable components that provide layered composability. You can use out-of-the-box Connectors from our Marketplace, customize or extend a protocol Connector, or build a fully custom Connector from scratch. Once a Connector is ready, you can easily make it available to multiple teams through Modeler.

BPMN enables composability for business processes

When talking about composability, we’re usually talking about application architecture. But the concept can be applied to business processes, too. The BPMN process modeling standard complements composable architecture because it abstracts the logic of a business process away from the technologies that execute the tasks that make up the process. This abstraction makes it easier to change the code or tools you use with little to no impact on process logic.

For example, imagine you have an e-commerce process that sends notifications to customers as their orders are packaged, shipped, and delivered. You could start with a bit of custom Java code that uses Spring’s JavaMailSender to send notifications via email. Later, you can replace that custom code with a feature-rich email tool such as SendGrid. It’s just a matter of replacing one task in the BPMN process model with another and migrating active process instances to the new version of the model.

Similarly, adding support for SMS notifications is just a matter of adding a task to the process model. For example, you can use Camunda’s Twilio Connector to enable automated, customized SMS messages without writing code. Our AI-powered Modeler Copilot can even suggest Connectors for you to use, based on the name of the task.

Learn more

Gartner has excellent resources on composable architecture, such as A Technical Guide to Composable Application Architecture and A Guide to Build Your Architecture for Process Automation.

To learn how to compose an architecture for business process orchestration, check out Camunda’s architecture best practices, which collects the knowledge and experience of Camunda engineers, consultants, and implementation experts.

To see Camunda’s composable platform in action and how it can help your business, schedule a demo or try it yourself with a free trial today.