Telling the Bit story: Celebrating 10 Years of Composability

For over a decade, we've pioneered composable architecture, empowering developers and organizations to build software effectively at scale. We've worked alongside a diverse range of customers, guiding them through the adoption of composability for various use cases.

We experienced firsthand the challenges of unlocking composability's full potential and over the years distilled our experience and learnings into a comprehensive, practical solution.

After ten years of refinement, we're excited to tell our story and introduce Harmony, a solution designed to make composable architecture accessible to everyone.

Like every other tech team, it all began with a dream. We envisioned a platform that would help people achieve great things. With a small passionate team of engineers, product manager, and designer by our side, we set off to make that dream a reality.

Things started off incredibly well. We quickly established a working platform with backend and a frontend application. We were excited about this initial progress, but also knew that the real challenge, and the greatest rewards lay ahead.

Facing the challenges of integrating diverse interfaces: a local application, a web UI, and a backend. We recognized the critical need for code reusability and maintainability and chose a micro service architecture, reusable components and a frontend application.

The initial launch revealed unforeseen complexities in platform maintenance. Making changes and integrating new features proved far more difficult than anticipated, often triggering a cascade of subsequent adjustments. This significantly impacted platform stability, which became an increasing concern.

Maintaining 30+ services became a burden. Our monolithic frontend app, hampered by its architecture, resisted growth. New features demanded complex cross-team coordination, sometimes to the point of impossibility. Certain bugs proved intractable, and the inherent complexity of our architecture limited our scaling potential.

Our architecture was holding us back. The long feedback loops, complex deployments, performance challenges, and dependency hell significantly limited our ability to deliver value quickly and effectively.

Our software had become a collection of disconnected fragments, limiting our ability to deliver new features and make changes. Introducing Harmony has provided the missing link: a way to build and integrate business features effortlessly into a unified platform. Read more about how Harmony works here.

With the adoption of Harmony, instead of wrestling with microservices, we focused on delivering value, composing a unified platform without the integration headaches. Our journey finally pivoted towards the path of success.

By tackling these complexities head-on, we not only streamlined our internal processes but also paved the way for others to embrace composability.

To minimize disruption and maintain continuous delivery while adopting Harmony, we chose a gradual approach. This allows you to build new features with Harmony while leveraging our 100% of existing codebase. Our Harmony adoption strategy involved:

• Adopt composability for new features.
• Minimize our core and leverage extensibility.
• Leverage 100% of our legacy code in the process.

Composability empowered us to build features without barriers. With this approach, we eliminated dependencies, shortened feedback loops, enabling developers to make changes confidently, without the risk of breaking existing functionality. We started making tangible progress.

By decoupling production from our organization structure we allowed developers to operate independently, experiment with new technologies, and deploy changes more frequently without impacting the stability and performance of the production environment.

We've shifted towards a single optimized and secure application build that composes independent features. This approach minimizes overhead, ensures optimal performance, and enhances the overall user experience.

Introducing new developers to Harmony enabled scaling by allowing them to work effectively on isolated, low-context tasks using a growing amount of standard and high quality APIs. This efficient workflow fueled the exponential growth of our technology.

Harmony naturally led us to "dogfooding" our APIs internally. This means we used our own APIs extensively, allowing us to identify and fix issues early on. By dogfooding, we refined API design, and ensured they met the needs of our internal dev teams before they caused issues.

Empowering teams with independence through composability significantly accelerated our innovation. By removing dependencies and bottlenecks, we've increased our deployment frequency to every 3 hours and reduced time-to-market for new features to ~9 hours. This allows us to respond rapidly to market changes while ensuring system stability and optimal performance.

Over the past years, Bit Cloud has grown to meet the evolving needs of both our customers and ourselves. It empowers you to focus solely on building your business products by unifying your software development processes. Bit Cloud provides an end-to-end solution for managing your platform, encompassing versioning, API discovery, continuous integration and deployment, ensuring stability, consistency, safety and optimal performance.

You can get started building new features with Harmony today, leveraging 100% of your existing code:

• Get started
• Start with AI
• Gradual adoption
• Read the Harmony announcement

Stay tuned for Hope AI announcements.

Godspeed,
Ran Mizrahi
Founder and CEO of Bit