The Future of Software Architecture

Do you know what is headless architecture, and why it is so important for the future of digital experiences? In our latest #AskTheHub interview, David Turewicz had a talk about headless architecture with Christopher Kühn from our #AmplifyreHub partner Graph CMS. Learn what this technology is all about and the advantages it provides to digital experiences.

David: Welcome to another edition of AskTheHub the series where we take questions from the community on business technology product development and talk with experts in the field from the Amplifyre hub today we have Christopher he is the CEO of Graph CMS and we will talk about what are the benefits of using headless software architecture. Hi Christopher how are you?

Christopher: Hi David thanks a lot for having me, yeah I’m looking forward to our discussion, and yeah nice to meet you.

David: Nice to meet you too, thanks for taking the time before we go into the topic of headless software architecture let's talk a little bit about your company Graph CMS what is the company about?

Christopher: So as the name says we are a content management system it's a graphql native content management system which means we are based on the graphql technology which is a query language, which is a successor of the rest of technology, we were founded five years ago and yeah we are headquartered in Germany but we have employees and colleagues all around the world joining us to serve our users and customers with our content management solution.

David: Cool okay then, let's get deeper into the topic of headless software architecture, what does it mean? Actually, it has this software architecture for the people out there that you know that is not so super technical and they maybe don't understand this term and can you explain this a bit.

Christopher: Sure, so headless software architecture is about decoupling the front end from the back end, it means that you have a back-end system in our case the content management system and the front-end which is the platform, the device so which would be a website interface or a mobile app interface these two things are connected, it means you have an API which is serving data in a raw format and then from the different platform it is consumed, so it opens up the possibility to serve your different channels or all the challenges which are out there, and it's based on the modern requirements of consumers because there's a demand for consistent omnichannel experiences and to be able to serve a good approach to use a headless architecture.

David: What benefits, in general, would you say people have to use this architecture actually? Why should they say, in general just headless software architecture is better these days maybe than the traditional way.

Christopher: Yes indeed as I mentioned already, we have a big advantage and the flexibility of serving all the different channels and devices, but then it also gives independence and freedom to the different teams which are working in these architectures. You have the teams which are co-writing, editing, or managing content which we do on the back end side but since this is decoupled from the front end at the same time the UX designers-the front end teams, the front-end developers can work on a specific web application and they can work as asynchronously or independently because it's not templated or not forced into a framework anymore.

David: Okay so which projects can I use mostly and with which project type does it make a lot of sense?

Christopher: Yeah for all the projects where you have different channels for sure, but also for projects which have a certain complexity or a certain specialization maybe for a very plain pure website, like a corporate website or a very simple marketing use case with landing pages not necessarily needed but if you have a more complex platform, a more complex digital product, where you have a streaming platform for music for videos or if you're having a bigger trailer platform then it totally makes sense that you have a headless architecture because then you can stitch together a lot of different services in the back end which are needed for this use case.

David: So when we take a look at software architecture, I mean headless is a term I hear a lot definitely when it comes to software architecture but in general where is software architecture heading? What do you see other trends right now and in which direction is it going?

Christopher: We see a lot in the market or also with companies embracing new tech stacks we see a lot that they're moving away from more monolithic solutions which could mean that you get a whole digital experience platform from a single vendor which has more or less all the functionalities some of them are great I was maybe not so great but you you basically buy what you get there and you cannot really pick and choose too much where what we see is that it's going more towards a micro service based architectures so called best of breed approach that you pick yeah the services and the functionalities you will need for your specific use case you pick it from the different vendors out there and you have then a compilation of different microservices where for example you get what you want to embed in your web application, search so you get a solution from a only search dedicated search vendor you want to embed a performance CMS systems you get for example the solution from us and then you integrate this all together and yes and then you could argue that this is a lot of integration effort but um today these apis are very well documented and very well standardized so actually it's very straightforward and and very quick to integrate these different microservices.

David: Okay so everything is getting more modular and the different modules are getting more and more specialized you know then people or companies are getting experts in these areas. Thank you very much for your insight on the topic of headless software architecture, and thanks for the time today.

Christopher: Yeah, thanks a lot dave for the interview, it was really great discussing with you, wish you a great day.

David: Cool, thanks to you too. So for the viewers out there if you have questions to GraphCMS or to help your software architecture, in general, please leave them down in the comments and we are happy to answer them. See you next time!

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