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 Being stuck on outdated, legacy technology only amplifies this pressure.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.
#The core technology principles of MACH architecture
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.
M - Microservice-based
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.
A - API-first
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.
C - Cloud-native
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.
H - Headless
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.
#Monolithic architecture vs MACH architecture
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. |
#Enterprise drivers for MACH adoption
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%).
#Business benefits of a MACH approach to architecture
Choose best-of-breed solutions
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.
Increase speed to market
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.
Reduce the risk of change
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.
Improve maintainability
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.
Create a composable, future-proof tech stack
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
#Examples of successful MACH architecture implementation
Dr. Oetker harmonizes platform infrastructure across 40+ markets
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.
Sennheiser moves to MACH architecture in 11 weeks
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:
- 200M API monthly API calls across 25+ global markets
- 74% increase in the use of add-to-cart functionality
- 136% increase in eCommerce conversion rate
#Hygraph unifies content across your MACH tech stack
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.
#Ready to make the move to MACH?
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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