MACH Alliance

The MACH alliance was founded in June 2020[4] by four companies: Contentstack, Commercetools, EPAM Systems, and Valtech plus ten inaugural members: Algolia, Amplience, Cloudinary, Constructor.io, Contentful, E2X, Fluent commerce, Frontastic, Mobify and Vue Storefront.[7]

MACH is an acronym for:[8][9]

• Microservices-based,
• API-first,
• Cloud-native software-as-a-service and
• Headless offerings.

About a year later, MACH membership reached 30 members[10] and again a year later doubled to about 60 members.[11]

The MACH Alliance actively seeks software vendors, systems integrators, agencies, consultancies, and individual experts who share their vision for open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystems. For like-minded organizations the MACH Alliance established certification standards that help identify those that embrace MACH philosophies and offer MACH-certified services. In order to become a member, an organization must be in full compliance.[5] Sticking to a concise definition of what services qualify and zealously enforcing this throughout their member application process has earned the MACH Alliance a reputation of being "bouncers controlling the velvet rope at the entrance of the Coolest Tech in Town Club".[12][6]

The MACH alliance's main activities in support of their advocacy of open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystem are: events and the publication of various content pieces.[13][14]

The advantages of an open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystem that the MACH Alliance advocates are:

• Flexibility: users can choose the cloud services they want based on their unique requirements and context allowing for easy customization and speedy changes.[9][15]
• Resourcefulness: the flexibility to choose only required cloud services implies a reduction in overhead, a leaner footprint compared to more holistic, all-in-one platforms, thereby reducing costs.[9][15][16][17]
• Best-of-breed: Best-of-breed, implying a collection of expert applications doing one thing really well, can improve quality and agility.[9][16][17]
• Developer focus: MACH supports being developer-first, which can be an asset for companies prioritizing developer experience.[9]
• Speed: MACH-based cloud services provide firms with faster rollouts that can be scaled faster.[17]

The open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystem that the MACH Alliance advocates has drawbacks:[9]

• Increased maintenance: managing many cloud services from different vendors brings maintenance hurdles associated with tracking, monitoring and securing the various integration points.
• Stitching: managing many cloud services from different vendors brings orchestration challenges when stitching them together to make service components talk to each other.
• Set-up costs: initial costs and engineering time can be higher compared to implementing all-in-one platform due to the coordination requirements between cloud services.
• Assistance: companies unfamiliar with MACH may need help from systems integrators or middleware to orchestrate connections between cloud services.
• Lack of standards: at present MACH is a general architecture rather than a standard specification, which implies that technologies and the behaviors may differ from cloud service to cloud service.

• Official website