MACH myths to consider when going composable

As an integration expert that enables composable commerce, Patchworks sees plenty of MACH myths out there which can be extremely misleading to businesses looking to explore different options.

MACH stands for microservice based, API-first, cloud-native, and headless. In short, it’s an approach to ecommerce which encourages an open and best of breed architecture.

But with every new way of doing things, it can take a while for people to fully understand its benefits. That’s why we’ve taken a look at some of the biggest MACH myths and dispelled them, to help you make more informed decisions.

Composable commerce is for big businesses with a huge budget

One of the biggest MACH myths out there is that a composable approach is extremely expensive, and out of reach for all but the largest companies.

But for the most part, this isn’t true. Businesses looking for a more open architecture have more freedom to go with the solutions they want, and can more easily scale software up and down as needed.

Plus, composable platforms such as BigCommerce, commercetools and Commerce Layer can help you with the initial foundations of building your website for a reasonable price. Then, you can develop on top of that.

That’s not an approach limited to big businesses. If anything, if you’re smaller, you’ve got more potential. Large businesses are typically already established with their monolithic platform, so restructuring to a brand new MACH platform can be time and resource consuming.

Meanwhile, SMEs are now adopting best-of-breed composable stacks, taking advantage of pre-integrated front-end solutions and simple to implement iPaaS platforms to launch quickly and trade effectively.

So don’t shy away from looking into a MACH approach just because you’re a small or medium sized business.

It’ll take ages to set up

All ecommerce businesses, whether they’re setting up their site for the first time or changing up their tech stack, want to be up and running as fast as they can. A quick deployment time means you can start making back the resources spent on development in a short time frame.

Monolithic ecommerce platforms are great at this, as they typically come with basic functionality right out of the box so that you can keep trading even if all your features aren’t live yet.

But a MACH myth which is often claimed is that composable systems will take a long time to get to a launchable state.

This claim comes from the misconception that developers need to work longer and harder to get a headless system up and running. But the fact that a composable operation decouples the front and back ends of your development means that your teams can work independently. They don’t have to worry about causing a disruption somewhere else, and can use pre-built solutions like Vue Storefront or Deity to rapidly prototype and integrate.

That results in a launch time which can be as fast, or faster, than traditional ecommerce systems. It also impacts your future maintenance; with the front and back end of your website decoupled, you don’t need to worry about fixing one area of your store only for it to snowball and cause issues for another area.

MACH architecture isn’t as safe or secure

When you’re selling online, it’s essential that your store is protected against cyber attacks which can leak sensitive data and completely shut down your website.

Some people believe that traditional ecommerce platforms are less susceptible to this. That’s because they’re huge companies with a fleet of developers and support experts, which provide you with data security as part of your subscription to their model.

These people assume that when you’re building a composable system from the ground up, you don’t have the same level of support to protect against cyber attacks. That’s one of our MACH myths.

A core component of MACH architecture is that it’s headless, decoupling the back and front ends of your website. This means you’re essentially reducing the size of the area which can be targeted and attacked.

For example, one of the most common cyber attacks on the internet is a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS). This overwhelms websites by driving enormous volumes of bot traffic to them, slowing and possibly completely crashing your operation.

But a decoupled architecture means the back end of your website communicates with the front end through APIs, which can be protected with firewalls and good software techniques such as caching. Plus, it’s harder for an attack to focus your back and front end separately - whereas a traditional architecture is tightly coupled and bad actors are more used to attacking standard implementations.

Enter Patchworks

We’ve covered a few MACH myths, but without a powerful integration partner, you’ll struggle to fully realise your composable vision.

The Patchworks integration platform is a no-code/low-code system with a self-serve dashboard, letting you take control of your own integrations, wrap legacy systems into APIs, and forge a way forward with composable architecture.

For more information, get in touch through our website for a free consultation and demo.