At Entando, we advocate for creating applications with what Gartner has called a composable business philosophy, which can be defined as “creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks.” These building blocks are organized around specific business capabilities.

In this blog series, we are discussing Entando’s fourfold vision for application composition. The four phases of application composition are: creation, curation, composition, and consumption.

The curation stage of the process involves cataloging the different building blocks of applications in centralized hubs, creating categorization, and logging inventory. Curators also ensure that components, business capabilities, and solutions are ready for composition, defining prerequisites and updating capabilities with the latest versions, patches, or upgrades. 

Depending on your organization or business model, you may benefit from one or more hubs.

Proprietary Enterprise Hub

The first kind of hub an enterprise can leverage is a proprietary enterprise hub. For users of the Entando platform, this is your organization’s personal instance of the Entando Component Repository, consisting of the capabilities unique to your business and accessible only by members of your own team. 

This internal cataloging system allows your organization to curate, update, and deploy your proprietary and secure business capabilities throughout the organization. 

Curation For Systems Integrators

While an enterprise may want to keep certain (or all) components private and proprietary, systems integrators may leverage a curation hub in order to maintain a catalogue of components and solutions to be deployed in their numerous clients’ applications. 

Through curation, systems integrators are given the ability to update or patch a business capability once, catalogue it, and then pull it from the hub to integrate with a client’s application only when that update is appropriate for the client. 

For example, not every update may be mission critical and can wait until other upgrades are being made. When that time comes, the system integrator can check for the latest version of the necessary components and easily check requirements. Because the capabilities were developed as discrete units, and the updated version was made to fit in the place of the previous iteration, deployment of these updates, patches, and upgrades is then streamlined.

Open Source Curation

Enterprises can also benefit from open source hubs like the Entando Hub, which is a community repository with an ever expanding catalogue of application building blocks in open source, whether they are subcomponents, components, widgets, packaged business capabilities, or even full solutions. In the open source community, enterprises and individuals can contribute capabilities that enterprises can use as-is or customize. 

Once you have drawn a component from the open source and customized it, you can then deploy it either to your proprietary enterprise hub, or to a systems integrator hub to be used on your clients’ applications.

In the next part of this series, we will discuss how enterprises and systems integrators take curated capabilities and compose them into user applications.

Build modular applications on Kubernetes with Entando ACP.

If you run containerized deployments, you understand the benefits of Kubernetes. You also understand how complicated it can be and how difficult it can be to gain developer adoption. It feels like there should be an easier way. 

That’s why we created an application composition platform that makes it easy to build enterprise applications on Kubernetes using modular components.

Entando ACP is changing the way enterprises think about building their apps, sites, and portals in order to promote developer productivity in a Kubernetes environment. 

With Entando ACP, you can:

• Bootstrap an application from a customized template.
• Accelerate app development to update iteratively.
• Simplify deployments by abstracting the complexity of Kubernetes.

We integrate trusted open source technologies and extend their functionality to give you a cohesive and streamlined developer experience with easy-to-use patterns. From deploying on Kubernetes to creating modular backend and frontend architectures using your current technologies, Entando helps you at every layer of the stack. 

Entando is open source with available enterprise support and services. Begin developing on the platform today, and get a quote to see how our team can help your enterprise build better apps, sites, and portals––faster.