Rise of Composable Web Architectures- Mathias Biilmann, Netlify

This is Textron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Matt Buen, who is c e o for net LiFi, and we're talking about how development is changing in the world, where things are becoming more composable in the way we build web applications and websites.

And there's some exciting new advances in that whole space. Matt, welcome to the show. Thank you.

Great to be here. How are all these web frameworks changing the way we think about application development? 'cause there's still a lot of folks working in procedural code and low code and no code.

I mean, what's going on with web frameworks these days? There, there's always a lot going on with, with, with web frameworks, right? Like, because one of the, one of the things I think that characterizes UI development is that it kind of have to change pretty fast, right?

Like the way people wanna be addressed by an app changes when your competitors differentiate in some way. Do you wanna figure out how you get on that train and, and, and, and do the same? Um, the, the UI space will, will keep evolving and keep getting new, new types of devices, new types of interacting with computers and so on.

That, that, that drives change there. So I think the, the UI layer has always had to be pretty fast evolving. And when, when I started JAMstack, when, when I started Netlify and point the term JAMstack way, way back in, in like, I, I started working on this in like 2013, launched Netlify in 2015, and, and, uh, coined, coined the term geg around that time, right?

It, it was really at a time where when you were building a web ui, whether that was a marketing site or an e-commerce or a full web application, you would typically build with some monolithic toolkit where the backend and the front end were tightly cobbled together, where the UI layer and the business logic layer and the data access layer was all in this sort of same box, right? Like you might use at some scale tools like WordPress, Drupal for that, or larger scale tools like Adobe Experience Manager or Sitecore or Commercial Cloud for that, or Magento or Shopify or Ruby and Rails or whatever, right? Like, but it was this recipe of like ui, business logic, everything is in the same box.

And we started first saying like, if you wanna be able to continuously iterate really fast on the user experience and build great up-to-date user experiences and have a lot of flexibility in swapping out the tools you use to build those, then you need to decouple that user experience layer from the backend layer, right? Like, and we started seeing that whole movement happening and leading to modern web frameworks and leading to all the modern hitless content management systems or hitless commerce systems and so on, right? Like, so that was sort of the first step of like, let's deco the UI from the backend and have teams be able to work just on the user experience on their own and ship really fast.

But now we are seeing also like this, this decoupling of all the different components, and especially when we talk talk larger companies, right? Like that's sort of where the, the notion of a compostable architecture starts being relevant, right? Like again, they've often gone from building, like from building on top of these very big monolithic systems, Adobe Experience Manager or Episerver or tools like that.

And now they're seeing all these different best in class tools emerge like content engines, commerce engines, billing engines, product catalog engines, search like Algolia or messaging like Twilio and so on, right? Like they no longer wanna buy one big box where all these different components like start, you might have one that's really good, but the rest of them starts looking really outdated compared to what's out in the market, right? Like so large companies wanna be able to say, we want to buy best in class components and then compose them together to to to what we are building.

Um, and, and, and that's sort of one of the biggest transformative, um, market forces. I think we are, we are, we are seeing now in the webs l landscape over the next like four or five years, right? Like where this idea of decoupling the UI has really been proven out, these individual components have gotten really strong and now, eh, enterprises are looking to way to migrate to composable architectures, but at the same time figuring out how to, how to then reduce the complexity of gluing together all these different components and, and having them like work together in harmony.

So there are components on the front end and now the back ends are essentially replaceable components that I can invoke through an a p i as I go along. Yeah. Um, what is the impact of all of that on the way we think about software engineering and DevOps workflows and all the heavy lifting that goes on in between?

I mean, I think we are starting to see a lot of the operational pieces being like take automated across a set of those, right? Like, so obviously at Netlify we've sort of taken the whole DevOps workflow for working with the web UI and build like best in class release management together with best in class infrastructure where your developers just write the code and push it. Um, and you get like staging environments for every single call request you make, you get like instant rollbacks.

Uh, there you can configure networking rules in the same place you work on your front end. So there's, um, disjointedness between networking teams and, and, and web teams and so on, right? Like, and I think in the same way we are seeing a lot of that happening in the individual components where maybe you would have a, a, a really big like effort to me maintain your core user signups database, uh, all the logic around that, the security layers you need there, the fraud detection, you need to detect fraud and logins and all of like the, the release management controls you need when you're dealing with that sensitive data.

And then maybe today you'll just delegate all of that to Okta or off zero depending on is it like your own employees or external users, right? Like that that's starting to, to become means mainstream in a similar way. You might run your own like Drupal install across lots of servers and scale it up and down and so on, right?

Like now you might just put the front end on, on Netlify and then buy Contentful or buy sanity or buy content stack for, for the actual content engine, have those team manage the scalability, the a p i performance and, and, and, and all of that, right? Like, so I think we are seeing more of those tools become off the shelf and reduce a bit the, reduce some of the need for, for in-house operations and, and DevOps. But then again, like I don't think anyone anywhere has like too many DevOps and, and too little for them to do.

So I think it's also something that, that that community by its nature is, is embracing, right? Like since that's always been a drive towards automation, Everybody and his brother that I talked to is kind of obsessive about developer productivity lately. And I, I always felt it was an issue anyway, but it seems like it's become a front and center conversation.

What's your take on what's fundamentally an issue here? Because it seems like on the one hand we wanna push more stuff to the developer and give them more control. On the other hand, the cognitive load gets too high and then they wind up spending most of their time doing things other than writing code.

Yeah. Again, I think it's another thing that's traditionally driven us, especially at larger scales, right? Like at small scales, you maybe just have a small full stack team working on the whole stack, right?

Like, but at larger scales that's not no longer realistic, right? Like, and there, I think there's this push towards figuring out like, can we have a team that really used to own this component and can own that component end to end ship it, validate it, be experts in it, can we have a team that works in the actual ui UI experience and can we have them like work at the speed that you want that UI experience to, to, to be driven at with like high, high velocity of iteration and so on and, and cut down on like the mental overhead of building across the, the whole stack all the time, right? I can, and, and we see it clearly on, on, on netlify when, when you look at our segment of just enterprise customers, right?

When I'm out talking to a lot of enterprise CIOs or architects and so on, and I ask them like, how often do you ship changes to production, like new code to production? It, it's often the answer is something like, we have like a, a release cycle of every two weeks we, we ship our, like our main release and so on, right? Like on netlify, the average for our enterprise customer is releasing changes to production at 140 times a week.

Um, when we take out the outliers that that would drive it even higher up, right? Like, and that's kind of like the level of, of iteration speed that that, that this architecture and tools like Netlify can help companies get to, right? Like, and I think there will only be more and more pressure to get there as tools like generative AI accelerate the speed of content production and code production and all of that, right?

Like, so I think we'll more and more see the need for that level of velocity be not, not an nice to have, but a need to have. Well, since you brought it up and we managed to get this far without anybody talking about ai, but here we go. Um, some folks are saying the front end of every app is gonna be a natural language interface, and then all the magic will happen behind that.

So do we need visual environments? What does the front end look like from here? That's gonna be a really interesting question, right?

Like, and I think we, we've worked a lot on, on also starting to build the tool set through Netlify Connect of like, how do you get all of your different content and commerce sources and transaction sources? How do you make those available to your web team so they can build great frontend experiences on top of them? And then on the other hand, we acquired a, a company called Stack Bid that specializes in like visual editing for this whole compostable stack that really allows us to bring in like the business stakeholders in like, how do we verify that it's the right things that are going live?

How do we like govern personalization and experimentation and so on? And I think those key components will keep being really relevant as we start seeing when the, the, the UI being rapidly reimagined for, for, for this new world, you'll still need to expose your company content and data and commerce source and product catalogs and so on to the web to make it available to, to also the language models or to whatever UI representations those demand. And as more of that might even be part of a loop where, where AI generates some of that content or personalizes it and so on, you'll need to be able to provide oversight over how does that, like are they doing the right thing?

Is it looking right? Is it, is it shipping the right thing? Then I think I'll see, like if you look at the history of new media in general, every time a new media comes along, it, it's edited.

It's not like we still have talk radio, right? Like, um, we still have posters on, uh, on, on, uh, stance in, in the city, right? Like every e even as we got internet and computers and so on, none, none of those old media actually went away, right?

Like we still have cable TV and so on. So I still think we'll see the same with the existing type of web UIs, right? Like they're there, they will evolve, they will change and adapt, but they'll still be there.

But then I also think that we'll see some whole new computer human interaction paradigms, right? Like once a computer can, can understand my spoken language with intonation and gestures and see what I do and make like, and respond to that, that'll obviously change how, how we expect to interface with computers and, and how we expect them to work with us. But my, my thesis is that they'll still need to be able to access information, know how to drive interactions.

They'll, companies will still want to control how that information is presented and ideally personalize it to, to, to the user that's accessing it and so on, right? Like, so we are sort of building the whole toolkit for, for, for being that glue layer and for driving that cadence of, of change that's gonna be necessary to keep up with this. Um, and then for making it really easy to compose together all these different services that that that will, that will evolve and play a part in this.

And it'll only accelerate the feeling that like your big monolithic software in a box, it's getting more and more out of date and more and more different areas, right? As they say, if I'm not looking at it, I'm not paying attention to it. So you gotta have, yeah, you gotta show me something.

What's coming next from you guys? Where are we? I mean, where are, I'm sure, I mean, the work is never done, right?

We have an exciting, uh, conference coming up or October 18th and 19th, uh, netlify pose where we are gonna show a, a, a lot of these new products to, to, to the world and, uh, have some launches. We are, we are, we are really excited about. Um, but we also just had a, had a big launch this week of, uh, Netlify, S t k, um, that's really our, our software developer kit for, for expanding netlify for integrating into Netlify, right?

Like, so when we talk about this composable world, like how can we, like, we can obviously build a set of integrations into different tools that, that, that people can enable. But with Netlify S D k, we've really made it possible for partners, technology partners or developers at large companies to build their own set of integrations with a full presence in Netlify UI that you can like customize the flows, it can feel like a natural part of, of, of our product and set up new build steps in your release management cycle, inject runtime functionality into your website, eh, define custom connectors to data or commercial sources for Netlify Connect's product line, um, and really be the central toolkit for expanding Netlify and making it your own. Whether that's as a tech partner that wanna share your product through Netlify, whether it's as a developer at an enterprise company that wants to make a set of internal tool available for your web team in an easily configurable and and, and predictable way.

All right? So I'm old enough to remember we talked about three tier applications back in the day and end tier applications back in the day. So in some ways is this not, you know, back to the future.

Um, I I think it's pretty different in, in, in reality, right? Like, I think one of the things I've, I've said for a long time, when you think about like the, the a architectures that that, that we probably both build a lot of, right? Like you typically really fought in terms of like, I have my application and my database, right?

Like, and that was sort of like, then, then, then you had the tiers of like load balancers and application servers and, and actual databases, right? Like, but I think we've seen that really split up, right? Like, so now you have your ui, like that's like maybe the, the, the center point and maybe even that UI is composed together of different micro front ends and so on.

And then behind that you might have one service that handles signups and authentication and authorization that has essentially its own database that you don't even know about, right? Like you might have one a p i that's like a hitless c m s that have your product catalog and your blog posts and your categories and so on. That's essentially another database that you don't have to manage and, and, and worry about.

Then you might have Stripe that manages subscription and billing and plans and that I'm obviously they have their own set of databases for that, but you don't think about them, right? Like, and suddenly you're no longer in that world and like one application and one database. You're really in the world of like, here's your UI and here's the different services that that UI is, is built from and, and, and talks through and, and consumes.

And that's why it's been really important for us because then the flip side of that is now when you start a new project, maybe you manually need to glue together all of those different services and set them up and make them talk to each other and get them into the right step in the built step and manage a p i tokens and secrets and so on, right? Like, so part of what we've been working on for a long time is like, how much can we just be the glue that ties all that together and identify s d K is a really big step in that direction because like now you can't really get to a point where you wanna add a globally distributed database. You just go in, you activate planet scale, you set it up with, with a few clicks, and you define like what you want your production environment to read from.

What do you want your like deploy reviews to read from, what do you want your local environment to read from? And, and now you're set and you can build on top of that like production, quality, data infrastructure, but you didn't have to do all the plumbing yourself. Right?

All right folks. Well, you heard it here. Software development.

It's kind of like having an orchestra without a composer to deliver the harmony and the melodies. It's just a lot of noise, but you can make it something beautiful. Hey Matt, thanks being in the show.

Thanks for having me. It's great In the.