When most people hear the word "MACH" they think of aircraft speed where velocity is expressed as a measurement relative to the speed of sound.

The IT industry loves to borrow terms from other industries and utilize them to describe technical concepts. So it should be no surprise that a MACH acronym was coined in 2018 and has since been broadly adopted as a way of describing modern system architectural concepts.

In simple terms, MACH is a combination of modern infrastructure that is used for constructing highly scalable software solutions. It provides enterprises the flexibility to deploy, scale, and replace any component of their solution based on dynamic business requirements, continuously implement best-of-breed technology, mitigate risk, and offer faster time to market.

The original MACH acronym was formulated from four specific concepts: Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless.

However, since the acronym was introduced, the industry has continued to evolve and additional characteristics have come to the forefront. As luck would have it, these new concepts continue to be aligned with the original MACH acronym...

M

- Modularity is at the heart of allowing organizations to adapt quickly and is the process of dividing a large monolithic system into smaller components which can be developed, deployed, and managed independently from one another.

- Microservices are a modular approach for server workloads, breaking them into collections of loosely-coupled services with discrete responsibilities.

- Micro Frontends are a modular approach for client applications where user interfaces are composed from semi-independent fragments at runtime.

A

- APIs continue to be the foundation of modern enterprise solutions, as they provide the flexibility to enable different software components to quickly and easily interact with one another.

- Asynchronous architecture is an essential aspect of any distributed system. It is generally implemented with a service bus or event hub which provides superior scalability as well as mitigates tight coupling between various parts of the system.

C

- Cloud-Native allows organizations to achieve the maximum potential of their systems by leveraging highly optimized services that have elastic scalability for each type of workload.

- Containers are portable units of software that contain all of the necessary components for an application to run across different computing environments.

- Composable architecture allows the individual components of the system to be replaced without affecting other parts of the system.

H

- Headless refers to an architecture where the front-end user experience is completely decoupled from the back-end logic, allowing for complete design freedom of the user interface.

- Hybrid attempts to solve the problem of re-usability by providing the ability to leverage investments and assets across different types of infrastructure and devices.

Reach out to Devessence to discuss how we can apply MACH architecture to your next exterprise project.