A vision for future opportunities and challenges is paramount for business success, hence the critical role of “future proofing”, particularly vis-a-vis adoption and ongoing adaptation of technologies. Thanks to their ability to future-proof tech stacks for enterprises, microservices and headless solutions are gaining popularity exponentially, as evidenced by the result of a recent MACH Alliance study that 79% of tech leaders plan to invest more in MACH technologies in the next year.
Cloudinary has been a proud member of the MACH Alliance since 2020. This post describes the MACH components and the alliance’s mission, contributions, and certification criteria for vendor members.
Our recent blog series elaborates on MACH and the related best practices. The Alliance defines the acronym MACH as follows:
- M (Microservices): Individual pieces of business functionality that are independently developed, deployed, and managed.
- A (API First): All functionality is exposed through an API.
- C (Cloud Native): SaaS that leverages the cloud beyond storage and hosting, including elastic scaling and automatic updating.
- H (Headless): Front-end presentation is decoupled from back-end logic and channel, programming language, and is framework agnostic.
As technology and trends evolve, replacing a single-vendor solution with a MACH approach translates to more agility and flexibility. Founded in 2020 as a nonprofit organization dedicated to advocating open and best-of-breed tech ecosystems, the MACH Alliance aims to “future-proof enterprise technology and propel current and future digital experiences” through MACH technology.
As a vendor-agnostic organization, the MACH Alliance does not promote, celebrate, or recommend one solution over another. Rather, the Alliance actively champions collaboration among members on the firm belief that “a rising tide lifts all ships,” as the saying goes.
With advocacy and education as two major pillars of its charter, the MACH Alliance regularly does the following:
- Share knowledge through blogs, whitepapers, and podcasts.
- Publish case studies of brands that have embraced MACH, delineating the benefits of its solutions, which are not available from monolithic suites.
- Commission original research on MACH adoption, barriers to entry, and the tech priorities of leaders across industries.
- Facilitate peer-to-peer networking to share experience of MACH transitions.
- Lend technical expertise by offering architectural blueprints and circulating RFP best practices to boost confidence in selecting technologies.
Among members of the MACH Alliance advisory board are technology executives from brands, digital agencies, analyst firms, and e-commerce platforms. Cloudinary is one of the certified Alliance members, among whom are Akeneo, BigCommerce, Contentful, Vue Storefront, and many others.
Like-minded companies are invited to become a contributing member of the MACH Alliance through an application process. Vendor members’ technology must meet these certification criteria:
- Composable connectivity. All other apps in the tech stack can connect to the vendor’s solution through the common language of APIs.
- Infinite scalability. A cloud-based solution means that the sky’s the limit (pun intended) for businesses’ evolving needs and tech upgrades.
- Ultimate swap-ability. MACH solutions’ headless approach enables the replacement or addition of apps with no disruptions of user experiences on the front end.
- Adaptability. To quote a MACH Alliance webpage, “Any place, any head.” The front-end possibilities are endless.
- Flexibility and transparency. Companies own their technology and are not locked into vendor systems.
To recap, the MACH Alliance serves as a helpful, knowledgeable, and seasoned guide for businesses that are evaluating the new, seemingly ambiguous MACH approach as a much more flexible and robust alternative to monolithic solutions. For more details, visit https://machalliance.org/.
Our recent posts on MACH shed more light on the topic:
Download the Executive’s Guide to Composable Architecture, and contact Cloudinary to get set up.
