In the first week we studied the Application Architecture with some meaningful readings:

• Back to the Basics.
• Strategic Architecture Roadmap for Composable Enterprise Applications (Presentation).
• Hype Cycle for Application Architecture and Development.
• Adapt Your Application Architecture Practices to Work Better With DevOps Teams.

An important concept described are the Composable Enterprise Applications. It defines based on business topics applications’ boundaries that exposes the important business functions through APIs or events mechanisms like IoT MQTT messaging, publish subscriber approaches, queues etc.

The reference architecture that Gartner proposes is truly meaningful and shows a path that can still consider previous investments made or applications that are third-party, not easy to modernize or convert in micro-services. Many OT applications have this characteristics and using events to help to decouple them, to allow innovation and agility, but at the same time use them as a composable application help company to create a roadmap to still keep and evolve some old of third-party applications while create new cloud native and based in micro services for other scenarios that are feasible.

The Gartner’s Reference Architecture for Intelligent Composable Business Applications defines how these applications can be organized. In the top of the image belo, you find the composed application experiences that can address specific business scenarios and just below to it a Composition Platform that enables the business to compose it and create different compositions for products and processes. Here also the concept of a marketplace of solutions is very key, as can help to expose to the corporation investments already made, avoid duplicated investments and also give flexibility and agility as provides a self service approach to consume business services.

In the left we have Business Operation applications and in the right Data Management Applications (Analytics Applications) that are integrated providing a 360° view of the information for customers, products and other important  data entities. The integrated Data Fabric works to maintain the data lineage, organize information and make it ready to be used.

Source: NATYS, Yefim. Strategic Architecture Roadmap for Composable Enterprise Applications.

Considering this reference architecture, we can connect technologies described by SINGH, Abhishek and O’NEILL, Mark on Hype Cycle for Application Architecture and Development. 2020 to make this concept even more powerfull. Cloud native applications can help to expedite the launch of new applications and make it easier to scale to meet unexpected or seasonal demands, also DevOps helps to deliver each composed application evolutions and having these decoupled business topics, each one can evolve without the risk of impact others. Also Low Code is very powerful on composition layer giving to citizen/business developers the power of using pre stablished APIs and connections using their knowledge to compose them and easily create new scenarios.