What Is MACH Architecture and Why Does It Appeal to Startups and Small Businesses?

What Is MACH Architecture?

MACH is an acronym that stands for microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native Software as a Service and headless. MACH architecture offers small businesses and startups a faster track to new minimum viable products, specifically software-based products and services. The structure also minimizes risk while leaving room for growth.

A quick overview of MACH’s core components is necessary to understand how it achieves these benefits for startups and small businesses:  

Microservices-Based: “With a microservices architecture, an application is built as independent components that run each application process as a service,” according to AWS. Simply put, this lets you scale specific functions of an application. If demand for a particular process of an application increases, a business can scale that process as opposed to the entire application.

Consider the example of an e-commerce platform. It might have entirely separate microservices for payment, shopping, user authentication, inventory tracking and email marketing. Each of those functions can scale as needed.

Microservices can be owned and operated by small development teams or leased as cloud services.

API-First: Application program interfaces tie different microservices together. Each microservice exposes a set of APIs. Without those APIs, a front-end e-commerce app, for instance, wouldn’t be able to validate a user, accept payment and talk to the other combination of microservices that let a customer complete an online purchase.

API-first prioritizes the design and implementation of APIs before any other part of the software, since APIs are the key interface mechanism for a set of microservices.

Cloud-Native SaaS: Cloud-native SaaS refers to SaaS solutions that leverage all the benefits of the cloud. This includes “elastic scaling of highly available resources,” according to the MACH Alliance.

The cloud eases the complex, behind-the-scenes hosting, data storage, scaling and testing involved in application development or deployment.

Headless: With headless, the “front-end presentation is completely decoupled from backend logic” so that software is “designed to be channel, programming language, and framework agnostic,” according to the MACH Alliance.

As an analogy, a kitchen at a restaurant can be likened to the back-end service (data, logic). The menu is the front-end interface (or app), and the waiter is the API that talks to the folks back in the kitchen. Even though the menu and the kitchen are totally separate entities, they can connect through the API.

What Makes MACH Architecture Ideal for SMBs?

Most startups and small businesses endeavor to grow revenue without taking on too much additional risk. Nothing can be too sacred for SMBs; they must quickly pivot away from what isn’t working and race toward what can work.

MACH Architecture brings this philosophy to an organization’s technology. It makes business IT “composable,” meaning microservices can be added or shed quickly and scaled as needed. APIs make this flexibility possible.

Cloud computing and SaaS let businesses spin up the underlying infrastructure such as data storage or quickly deploy third-party, SaaS-based microservices. Limitless, service-specific scalability enables speedy addition and subtraction of resources.

With headless, it’s easier to optimize and re-optimize user interfaces to improve the user experience. Brands can evolve and change quickly, and new channels can be launched for new devices to improve reach and gravitate toward omnichannel. New sources of data can be introduced that improve the customer experience. All of this can happen because the front end exists independently of the rest of the infrastructure.

Equally important, MACH architecture can help SMBs and startups avoid falling into the trap of technical debt. Businesses sometimes find themselves bogged down maintaining old systems or technology that was purchased to fulfill a particular need.

With MACH, short-term technology requirements don’t have to mean short-sighted investments. Microservices and cloud infrastructure are inherently flexible and can adapt to the needs of the moment without becoming liabilities later.

EXPLORE: The technology solutions that are right sized for your small business.

MACH Delivers Significant Growth Potential

In 2011, Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, gave a short speech at an event called “HackFwd Build 0.7.” He said that in Amazon’s early days, the company managed a single, monolith application codebase. That codebase became bloated, and new deployments became cumbersome.

“We got to a point where we had architecture that didn’t scale because it’s all dependent on massive databases on the back end,” Vogel said. “Every year we did what was called WD-40 and duct tape engineering.” Scale was Amazon’s challenge, and architecture was the blocker.

In response, Vogels said, they looked for each piece of unique business logic in their AppServ (also known as App Runner), figured out what data that business logic operated on, brought those together and “slapped” an API around it.

“And that’s what we call a service,” he said. “No direct database access allowed anymore; the only way that you could talk is through the business logic through the API.” This also has security benefits, because only certain APIs can interface with certain data sets.

At the time of Vogels’ talk, “microservices” wasn’t a buzzword yet. Nevertheless, that is exactly what Vogels was describing, and it became the basis for Amazon’s e-commerce application. The rest, of course, is history.