Why MACH Alliance Matters?

Mach Alliance is an organization to present and advocate a new, open, and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystem. The Alliance’s mission is to future proof enterprise technology and to propel current and future digital experiences with open and connected enterprise tech.

The alliance was formed in June 2020 and consisted of 14 members at the moment of the founding.

The objectives of the alliance:

• Spread the technical knowledge about MACH.
• Define best practices that help organizations to transition to a MACH architecture.
• Provide assistance to enterprises in the selection process including development of the selection criteria for RFPs.
• Develop technical documentation, such as architectural blueprints and other technical content.
• Host MACH Alliance events and serving as a collective resource at key industry events to educate the industry about the matter. 

With single-vendor full-stack platforms organizations risk becoming victims of vendor lock-ing and bloated legacy technology stacks which limit their ability to address rapidly changing business requirements. Addressing these challenges requires a different approach to business operations, backed by a software ecosystem that provides a flexible, truly open, and future-proof architecture.

What is MACH Architecture

MACH stands for Microservices, API-First, Cloud-Native, and Headless:

• The microservices-based architecture provides the necessary modularity that allows an application to be broken down in independent package business capabilities. Monolith solutions usually can’t achieve this due to tightly coupled capabilities which are not designed to be deployed independently.
• The headless architecture enables businesses to deliver continuous customer journeys across multiple digital and traditional touchpoints. It also allows driving revenue growth by enabling new business models, for example, enable sales through connected devices.
• The cloud-native aspect is crucial because it provides business with elastic scalability, high availability, and robust security. Also, it makes it easy for an enterprise to use only the capabilities they need on-demand without the need to deploy the whole suite on-prem or in a private cloud.
• APIs are crucial for an enterprise to accelerate time-to-market for new experiences and business models. API design impacts how quickly developers can learn them and how quickly they can develop new channel applications.

Explore how Elastic Path Commerce Cloud relies on the MACH architecture to deliver Composable Commerce.