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Composable Stacks on the Cloud

Sylexa Team · 7/5/2025

Cloud-native architecture diagram and developer workstation

Composable architectures shine when interfaces are stable and responsibilities are clear. Invest in contracts—not coupling—so services evolve independently.

Balance speed with safety: use managed platform primitives for security and observability, and enforce guardrails through IaC and policy-as-code.

Principles of composability

  • Small, well-bounded services with explicit SLAs and versioned APIs
  • Contracts first: schema and interface stability over internal details
  • Observability built-in: tracing/metrics/logs standardized across services

Reference blueprint (AWS/Azure/GCP)

  1. Edge/CDN for caching, routing, and security headers
  2. API Gateway + serverless/container runtime for services
  3. Managed data stores (RDS/Cloud SQL, DynamoDB/Cosmos, object storage)
  4. Event bus/queues for async workflows and decoupling
  5. Centralized observability (OpenTelemetry), feature flags, and secrets

Implementation outline

  1. Define domain boundaries and APIs (OpenAPI/GraphQL, versioned)
  2. Create shared platform modules (auth, logging, error semantics)
  3. Automate infra with IaC and policy-as-code (drift detection)
  4. Set budgets and SLOs; keep a performance backlog per service

Operational tips

  • Design for failure: retries, idempotency, and circuit breakers
  • Version interfaces and deprecate with clear timelines
  • Run game days to validate incident response and failover paths