The digital paradigm has changed drastically throughout the last two years after seeing steady growth over the previous two decades. eCommerce businesses are breaking from the shackles of traditional and monolithic digital commerce platforms to stay ahead of the curve and offer superior and unmatchable customer experience.
The MACH approach enables the eCommerce platforms to be more flexible, agile, and innovative to exceed the fast-changing consumer habits and expectations. The acronym MACH spells out as Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. This new commerce technology allows businesses to create a tech-stack niche to the functionality of the business while developing a feature-rich solution for the customers.
The MACH alliance Advisory Board Member Giles Smith recently captured the powerful essence of MACH when he said, “In my view, composable architecture [which leverages MACH] lets you pick the right choices for your customer and teams which brings together specialist technology over a generalist.”
As stated by Gartner, customer experience bundled with omnichannel experience, employee experience, and user experience will drive the focal strategic technology trends in the future. Abiding by these rules will transform business outcomes, and to facilitate positive results, the businesses will have to evolve to the new MACH approach. Almost 66% of developers say that technical debt and maintenance associated with the legacy systems are the main reasons for hindered productivity.
So for businesses to speed up evolution to unforeseen levels, it is imperative to embrace this new tech stack and explore the endless possibilities.
In this article, we try to break down the fundamentals of MACH architecture for you to implement these core approaches and break from the shackles of traditional commerce.
What is MACH architecture?
The Microservices-based headless architecture enables digital business owners to deliver a seamless online shopping experience to customers across multiple devices, covering various channels. The four pillars that differentiate it from traditional commerce are:
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Microservices:
Leveraging microservices-based commerce enables the developers to provide flexibility, scalability, and resilience in their eCommerce structures. This means that the independent business functionalities are developed, deployed, and managed individually as the quantum of serverless functions.
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API-First:
This is the connective tissue of the MACH architecture. The application programming interfaces link the system pieces together so all the separate components can work in harmony. These APIs connect the various microservices and facilitate data exchange between the presentation layer(frontend) and the backend.
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Cloud-Native:
Hosting the digital architecture in the cloud provides the digital commerce businesses with the scope to virtually infinite scalability. Everything is backed up and ready to use by vendors. A cloud-native architecture is a perfect solution to facilitate the business’s constantly changing needs by providing out-of-the-box solutions driving innovation and agility.
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Headless:
This term has been making a buzz for some time now. The approach follows the decoupling of the frontend and the backend of an eCommerce solution to allow the development teams to create tailored online storefronts with no disruption to the backend. This leads to personalized customer experiences like checkouts, wishlists, recommendations, and searches.
In a traditional monolithic architecture, the businesses are limited by their hundred percent dependability on a single system to handle everything. In contrast, MACH allows the companies to pick from the best available technologies and platforms for each functionality.
Let us move on to why MACH has gained exceptional popularity in such a short time.
Pros and Cons of MACH Architecture
Before explaining the MACH Architecture in the context of the current digital revolution, it is crucial that we understand what benefits and challenges it poses during and after implementation. 
Role of MACH Architecture in Current Commerce Landscape
Content and commerce are inter dependable and need constant and swift changes. Traditional commerce architecture does not allow businesses to make these changes frequently as it is cumbersome and tedious to dive into the deep ends of the code now and then.
This is where MACH enters. It lets digital businesses keep pace in the technologically changing landscape. This new approach represents the best in breed technology and allows the merchants to meet where the customers are. Also, the MACH approach makes it easier for businesses to remove the limitations of suite products in terms of out-of-the-box functionality.
MACH-based enterprises are now coming forward to support the reasons behind solidifying the MACH movement. The hero behind the movement is businesses’ experiences with microservices, APIs, cloud, and headless, which are relevant to business owners, decision-makers, and technical experts alike.
But we are a long way from home. Such a technical concept needs time, education, and awareness, which is what MACH-based enterprises are geared up to. We are all in this together to reap the benefits of this new technology, even while transitioning to this approach.
MACH Benefits for Enterprises
Commerce tech has evolved exponentially over the past few years as businesses strive for new ways to distinguish themselves and enhance their performance. MACH is especially beneficial for those enterprises who wish to stay ahead of the curve while adapting to the changing scenarios and not be left behind because of outdated technology.
Numerous commerce and content platforms are still clinging to their monolithic-architecture-driven models and bear the fear of uncharted territory. But failure to move on can result in too much technical debt and inability to capitalize on potential opportunities. The MACH approach addresses this issue by offering the enterprises a fresh start equipped with flexibility and scalability. By leveraging this new tech, businesses can incrementally implement the concepts and functionalities while keeping their essence alive.
Let’s understand this with the most talked-about example of today’s hyper digitized headless era.
Most Famous Example of MACH Architecture in Action
When it comes to implementing the MACH architecture, no one has done it better than Amazon. The organization has been playing with microservices since 2006 and now has thousands more serving as individual components for hundreds of UIs.
Amazon has also been paving the way for the headless space after creating the Amazon Echo IoT device and now with Dash ordering. They have made the most of the decoupled frontend-backend tech by flawlessly deploying updates every 11.7 seconds without any interruption to their services.
Conclusion
The MACH architecture is the new way to future-proof businesses in the digital space. It draws many parallels with the Service-Oriented Architecture yet modernizes the concept greatly. The MACH approach leverages recent tech advancements that have spawned in the last decade, including the SaaS, API-first approach, and headless microservices. It is gradually becoming the new normal with big industry players like commercetools, VTEX, Vue, Adobe Commerce, and Shopify making a dent in the traditional approach. The MACH approach enables businesses to become more proactive and agile in their digital strategies while rendering superior CX to their customers.
Is your online business technologically equipped with this new architecture giving you the ability to be heard above the noise? If you want to know more about MACH or headless commerce in detail, please refer to our free eBook: Headless Commerce: A Definitive Guide. Also, talk to our headless experts today to see how we can help with your headless implementation.
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Shivi Rao is a content marketer with Krish. She has worked in various industries spanning technology, science, rural marketing, startups & unicorns, eCommerce business, and digital marketing, believing that content is the foundation to facilitate the visibility of any organization and ensuring her words do the same. In her free time, you can either find her lifting weights in the gym or feeding the strays.
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From Monolith to MACH Series – Headless (4/4)
12 July, 2023 “Headless architecture” is a part of the MACH approach. It was first introduced by commercetools founder Dirk Hoerig in 2012. In this architecture, the presentation layer is decoupled from the backend, which enables greater flexibility and scalability. It helps in delivering content across multiple channels and devices. Traditionally, people followed the monolithic approach. In this setup, websites and applications have a tightly coupled architecture with interconnected frontend and backend. As a result, any changes to the frontend require modifications to the backend. On the other hand, a headless architecture keeps the two layers separate so that they can evolve independently. The term "headless" refers to the removal of the head, which refers to the frontend or user interface. This is a Monolith to MACH series of 4 informative articles, each explaining different components of the MACH architecture - Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless architecture. Read on…
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