Organisms require energy to function, just like software applications need capabilities to function. To get this energy, organisms must eat macronutrients: carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. But there are significant differences in how organisms metabolize food, even within the same species. One person to the next will have different functioning of metabolic pathways, based on genetics or environmental or lifestyle factors. One key difference is metabolic flexibility, the ability of a person to efficiently switch between burning different macronutrients to power life processes. A metabolically inflexible person may have difficulty burning fat, or be insulin resistant and have difficulty metabolizing carbs. Research has shown that metabolic inflexibility is a key contributor to all-cause mortality. Cellular infrastructure is needed to maintain metabolic flexibility to efficiently burn fat, and this infrastructure is mitochondria. But like any infrastructure, this cellular infrastructure needs to be built. In biology, this can be accomplished in various ways, including exercise, intermittent fasting, and cold exposure.
In software, metabolic inflexibility describes a general inability to compose pre-existing capabilities together to form a solution. A distinctive rigidity that creates fault lines between capabilities that either limits usability or involves substantial implementation complexity. Monolithic software systems that exhibit strong metabolic inflexibility are characteristically brittle, not easily adaptable, and often difficult to maintain.
In contrast, a metabolically flexible software development environment follows Gartner's Composable Business Software Architecture. A composable architecture enables rapid change, and rapid change can easily be the difference between life and death for enterprises experiencing a changing business environment. The Golden Path means more than simply building the software and calling it done. The Golden Path means building a living software organism that is easy to maintain, scale, and manage.
Per Gartner, the four pillars of composable software are modularity, discoverability, orchestration, and autonomy. With the foundational concepts presented so far, we are able to begin describing the specific functions of the Virtuoso and Montage infrastructures. The detailed introduction could begin with either one, but we present the Montage infrastructure first because, as we will see, Montage is less "opinionated".