MACH architecture stands for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. It is built from independent, modular components that integrate easily via APIs. This approach allows organizations to create a composable tech stack where each component can be added, changed, or removed as business needs evolve.
Source: Hygraph Blog: MACH Architecture
Monolithic architecture delivers software as one large application with tightly coupled dependencies, centralized data, and limited flexibility. MACH architecture, in contrast, uses independent services connected via APIs, allowing for elastic scaling, continuous updates, and the ability to choose best-fit solutions for each business need.
Source: Monolithic vs MACH Architecture
Key benefits include flexibility to choose best-of-breed solutions, increased speed to market, reduced risk of change, improved maintainability, and the ability to create a composable, future-proof tech stack. MACH architecture enables rapid innovation, better customer experiences, and sustainable business resilience.
Source: Business Benefits of MACH
According to the MACH Alliance, 87% of organizations have increased their MACH technology adoption in the past year, with MACH now making up 49% of front- and backend infrastructure. Top drivers include improving customer experience (54%), innovating faster (53%), and gaining competitive advantage (49%).
Source: MACH Alliance Research 2024
Gartner predicts that by 2027, at least 60% of new B2C and B2B digital commerce solutions developed for the cloud will be aligned with MACH architecture principles.
Source: Gartner Research
Hygraph is a certified MACH Alliance vendor offering a headless CMS that uses Content Federation to unify content data from all MACH architecture components into a single GraphQL API. This enables businesses to move from inflexible monolithic suites to modular, best-of-breed architectures.
Source: Hygraph Blog
Hygraph provides a GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and a wide range of integrations (e.g., Netlify, Vercel, Shopify, BigCommerce, AWS S3, Cloudinary, Algolia, Next.js). It supports rapid content delivery, enterprise-grade security, and is designed for both technical and non-technical users.
Source: Hygraph Features, Integrations
Hygraph integrates with hosting and deployment platforms (Netlify, Vercel), eCommerce solutions (Shopify, BigCommerce, commercetools), localization tools (Lokalise, Crowdin, EasyTranslate, Smartling), digital asset management (Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot), personalization (Ninetailed), AI (AltText.ai), and more.
Source: Hygraph Integrations
Yes, Hygraph offers a powerful GraphQL API for efficient content fetching and management.
Source: Hygraph API Reference
Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant. It offers SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments to protect sensitive data.
Source: Hygraph Security Features
Hygraph emphasizes rapid content distribution and responsiveness, which improves user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. Optimized delivery reduces bounce rates and increases conversions.
Source: Headless CMS Checklist
Hygraph offers a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans.
Source: Hygraph Pricing
Hygraph is ideal for developers, IT decision-makers, content creators, project/program managers, agencies, solution partners, and technology partners. It serves modern software companies, enterprises seeking to modernize, and brands aiming to scale, improve development velocity, or re-platform from traditional solutions.
Source: ICPVersion2_Hailey.pdf
Industries include Food and Beverage (Dr. Oetker), Consumer Electronics (Samsung), Automotive (AutoWeb), Healthcare (Vision Healthcare), Travel and Hospitality (HolidayCheck), Media and Publishing, eCommerce, SaaS (Bellhop), Marketplace, Education Technology, and Wellness and Fitness.
Source: Hygraph Case Studies
Yes. Komax achieved 3X faster time to market, Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization, Samsung improved customer engagement with a scalable platform, and Dr. Oetker enhanced their digital experience using MACH architecture.
Source: Hygraph Product Page
Hygraph is designed for quick implementation. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months from initial contact. Customers can get started quickly by signing up for a free account and using documentation and onboarding guides.
Source: Hygraph Documentation, Top Villas Case Study
Customers can expect time-saving through streamlined workflows, ease of use, faster speed-to-market, and enhanced customer experience through consistent and scalable content delivery. These benefits help modernize tech stacks and achieve operational efficiency.
Source: ICPVersion2_Hailey.pdf
Hygraph addresses operational pains (reliance on developers, outdated tech stacks, conflicting global team needs, clunky content creation), financial pains (high costs, slow speed-to-market, expensive maintenance, scalability challenges), and technical pains (boilerplate code, overwhelming queries, evolving schemas, cache problems, OpenID integration).
Source: Hygraph Product Page
For developers: Hygraph reduces boilerplate code and streamlines query management. For content creators/project managers: It provides an intuitive interface for independent content updates. For business stakeholders: It lowers operational costs, supports scalability, and accelerates speed to market.
Source: Hygraph Product Page
KPIs include time saved on content updates, system uptime, consistency across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, time to market, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage.
Source: CMS KPIs Blog
Hygraph provides 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users have access to documentation, video tutorials, webinars, and a community Slack channel.
Source: Hygraph Contact Page
Comprehensive technical documentation is available at Hygraph Documentation.
Notable customers include Sennheiser, HolidayCheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes.
Source: Hygraph Case Studies
Dr. Oetker harmonized platform infrastructure across 40+ markets using Hygraph, Algolia, and Next.js, enabling unified content management and rapid updates. Sennheiser moved to MACH architecture in 11 weeks, achieving 200M monthly API calls, a 74% increase in add-to-cart usage, and a 136% increase in eCommerce conversion rate.
Source: Hygraph Blog
Customers can sign up for a free-forever account and access resources like documentation, video tutorials, and onboarding guides. The platform is praised for its intuitive interface and ease of use, even for non-technical users.
Source: Try Hygraph, Documentation
Last updated by Katie
on Aug 07, 2024Originally written by Nikola
As the world becomes more tech-savvy, the pressure is on for businesses to continuously keep their digital experience ahead of changes in customer expectations and market shifts.
A survey of over 500 enterprise technology leaders found that 75% of decision makers feel a greater urgency to innovate in 2024 compared to the past 5 years. Being stuck on outdated, legacy technology only amplifies this pressure. In organizations where over three quarters of the technology ecosystem is considered legacy, 94% of respondents felt a greater urgency to innovate.
Improving the enterprise tech stack is now a strategic priority for most organizations, according to Forrester’s Priorities Survey 2023, which found that “technology optimization now carriers more weight as a key driver for efficiency, acceleration, and innovation than it ever has in the past.”
Increasingly, enterprises are turning to a MACH approach to architecture to optimize their tech stack.
By 2027, at least 60% of new B2C and B2B digital commerce solutions, developed for the cloud, will be aligned with MACH architecture principles.
Gartner Research: When Should Applications Use a MACH Architecture Approach?
This article will take a look at the core MACH architecture principles, why the MACH approach is being adopted, and examples of successful MACH implementation in the enterprise space.
MACH architectures are made of independent, modular components that are designed to easily integrate with one another. Instead of limiting digital experience to the capabilities of a one-size-fits-all software suite, a MACH approach lets organizations pick best-fit functionality for different areas of business to create a composable tech stack where each component can be added, changed, or removed as business needs evolve.
The term “MACH” comes from the four technology principles that underpin this type of architecture.
Microservice-based software is built as a set of independent components— microservices — where each component operates on its own and interacts with others through APIs. As a result, teams can deploy, change, and scale separate software components without disrupting the rest of the system.
Each microservice is responsible for a distinct piece of business functionality such as inventory, catalog, checkout, storefront, reviews, etc.
The independence of microservices lets teams improve different parts of the experience in parallel, quickly isolate faults by testing individual services, and even swap out services with minimal disruption to the user experience.
API-first technologies expose all functionality and data via APIs. APIs provide a structured way for services to communicate with each other, which gives organizations a lot of flexibility in how they bring together the different components of their MACH architecture to serve a range of experiences, touchpoints, and customer needs.
An API-first architecture greatly simplifies software development. It helps teams eliminate data silos, unify backend logic, and reduce the time it takes to launch new user features and customer channels.
Cloud-native applications take full advantage of cloud benefits, like elastic scaling and automatic updates, as opposed to software that was originally built to be on-premise which has just been lifted-and-shifted to cloud hosting.
Most MACH vendor solutions are offered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which means that the vendor is responsible for infrastructure maintenance including cloud hosting, security updates, performance monitoring, and continuously rolling out improvements to platform functionality. Freeing up internal teams to focus on building the capabilities and services that are unique to the business.
Headless solutions separate backend logic from frontend presentation, allowing businesses to use a unified backend architecture to support many different frontend channels and devices.
With headless, all data is sent to the frontend via APIs. This gives teams the freedom to use any frontend framework they prefer, and the flexibility to create different experiences for different audiences. It also makes it possible to reuse data and logic to quickly spin up new channels, such as sites for different brands or locals.
For many companies, moving to MACH means moving away from a monolithic software platform.
In a monolithic architecture, software is delivered as one large application and functionality is designed to work as a whole. This can be great when business needs align with the monolith’s capabilities, but as digital becomes more of a strategic priority many organizations are finding that their legacy monoliths can’t provide the functionality or flexibility needed for the next phase of digital experience.
In a MACH architecture, functionality is delivered by independent services and connected via APIs. Allowing companies to create a tech stack of built and bought services that best-fit their strategy.
Here are some of the key differences between these two approaches to enterprise architecture:
| Monolithic architecture | MACH architecture | |
|---|---|---|
| Dependencies | Processes are highly dependent on each other. Making a change to one part of the experience risks a waterfall of errors across the whole application. | Functionality is delivered by independent services and connected via APIs. Changes to one service won’t impact the logic of another. |
| Data structure | The platform has a centralized database. The software vendor defines the data structure. | Each microservice has its own database. Businesses can use the data structures that make the most sense for each service. |
| Scalability | The application has to be scaled as a whole. Often leading to a lack of capacity at critical moments, or the high cost of on-call resources that sit unused most of the time. | Services can be scaled independently. Peaks in traffic can be handled cost-effectively with elastic scaling. |
| Updates | The entire application is updated at once, often through a major version upgrade that requires substantial downtime to implement. | Services can be updated continuously and in parallel. SaaS vendors provide rolling updates that require no manual effort. |
| Flexibility | The monolith is designed to use a specific set of features, business processes, and templates. Customizations require complex work-arounds that are hard to maintain. | Businesses can choose the vendor solutions, functionality, frameworks, and custom-built services that best-fit their strategy and ways of working. |
According to the annual survey by the MACH Alliance, an organization that advocates for MACH in the enterprise, 87% of organizations have increased the percentage of MACH technology in their infrastructure over the past year. On average, MACH now makes up 49% of front- and backend infrastructure.
Technology decision makers reported a wide range of drivers behind their move to MACH. The three most commonly cited reasons were to improve customer experience (54%), the ability to innovate faster (53%), and to improve competitive advantage (49%).
MACH architecture allows enterprises to take advantage of the best digital services available. Instead of being locked into a set of “good enough” capabilities from one large software suite, a MACH approach lets teams work with different cutting-edge solutions for each part of the experience. Giving companies the power to create a unique tech stack that’s optimized to their customers, markets, and business needs.
The agility of MACH architecture gives businesses a significantly faster route to MVP (minimum viable product). Modular services allow development teams to roll out prototypes that help prove key concepts before investing in large-scale implementation, and make it possible to transition to a MACH architecture in steps instead of one big bang replatform.
The headless structure also lets teams reuse existing infrastructure, logic, and data to bring new channels, touchpoints, and other innovative experiences to market quickly.
With a monolithic solution, making changes in one area of the experience can potentially disrupt the integrity of the entire system. This has often been a cause of bugs, security flaws, and time-intensive testing periods for even the smallest changes.
In a MACH architecture, microservices work independently so changes to one microservice won’t disrupt the functionality of another. Teams can quickly test new features and services and observe how they work in practice without compromising the stability and security of the entire system.
Working with cloud-native SaaS solutions means that vendors take on the burden of maintaining infrastructure, as well as ensuring services work smoothly with any major changes in cloud platforms, programming languages, web browsers, and other key technologies.
A SaaS model also means that rolling updates can be delivered through the cloud, removing the need for versioning and lengthy manual updates. So the platform is constantly evolving with best practices and, if there is an issue, fixes can be pushed quickly.
The modularity of a MACH architecture lets businesses create a composable tech stack where technologies can be added, replaced, or removed with minimal disruption.
This composability gives teams the agility to experiment with emerging services, like AI tools, to adapt to changing customer demands, or even to pivot to whole new business models without having to rip-and-replace their entire digital experience ecosystem.
At every level of the business technology stack, composable modularity has emerged as the foundational architecture for continuous access to adaptive change. Businesses rely on it to achieve sustainable business resilience and growth.
Gartner Research: Predicts 2024: Composable Modularity Shapes the New Digital Foundation
A global leader in the Food and Beverage industry, the Oetker Group, needed a technology solution that would make it easier to keep the customer experience consistent across brands, enable fast update cycles, and empower regional teams to adapt the experience to each market.
To do this, Dr. Oetker created a composable architecture that includes MACH vendor solutions for headless content management (Hygraph), site search (Algolia), and the frontend framework (Next.js). Combined with in-house services and legacy applications for storing product information (PIM) and recipes.
With this MACH architecture, the Dr. Oetker team is able to:
Unify core infrastructure across all brands, websites, web apps, and portals which makes it easier to streamline business processes, ensure compliance, and role out global updates at a fast pace.
Eliminate data silos by using Content Federation to give teams access to all content, recipes, product information, and search insights in one place.
Use granular permissions to allow over 100 stakeholders to simultaneously manage unique experiences for 45 brands in over 40 countries.
When Sennheiser, the German audio equipment manufacturer, wanted to move their direct-to-consumer eCommerce shops to a unified, headless architecture they had a few tight constraints. The solution needed to work with their existing Shopify commerce platform, it had to be launched and maintained with minimal internal IT resources, and the flagship store needed to go live in 4 months.
To minimize the need for backend development, they turned to MACH solutions for content management (Hygraph), site search (Search.io, now part of Algolia), and DevOps management (Netlify). With this MACH stack, 90% of the hosting set-up and maintenance was provided out-of-the-box which made it possible to launch the new flagship eCommerce site in just 11 weeks.
This composable, mobile-optimized architecture has led to:
Hygraph is a certified MACH Alliance vendor that helps businesses switch from inflexible, monolithic suites to modular, best-of-breed architectures. Hygraph offers a headless CMS that uses a novel process, Content Federation, to act as the “glue” that federates content data from all the components of your MACH architecture into a single GraphQL API.
Digitally-driven enterprises with big ambitions for customer experience should strongly consider a MACH architecture. Stepping away from rigid monoliths and towards flexible, modular services lets organizations create a future-proof tech stack that can evolve as customer demands and business needs change.
To learn more, check out the guide on making the move from monolith to MACH.
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