MACH Architecture

"Jamstack" was originally cased as "JAMstack" where "JAM" stood for JavaScript, API & Markup.

Jamstack opened the doors for developers to build sites that were more secure, scalable, performant, and cost-effective in an era when those achievements were earned with a headache at best.

The term "headless" refers to removing the dependency of knowing where data will be displayed and just holding the data to be used wherever the developer chooses.

This is often used to describe a CMS where content can be authored, stored, and then delivered to one or many applications that determine how that content is displayed.

In short, a content model gives structure and organization to your content.

Within your overall content model, you’ll have individual content types that can be collected together like an outline.

You can also think of the content type as the “stencil” for the “drawing” that will be your entry.

A design system is a complete set of standards intended to manage design at scale using reusable components and patterns.

• Design (and development) work can be created and replicated quickly and at scale.

• It alleviates strain on design resources to focus on larger, more complex problems.

• It creates a unified language within and between crossfunctional teams.

• It creates visual consistency across products, channels, and (potentially siloed) departments.

• It can serve as an educational tool and reference for junior-level designers and content contributors.

Site Builder: An engine that enables rapid design and development of digital experiences.

Site Builder is a cross product platform where we combine content, design and code in one place.

Teams are given a set of pre-approved building blocks to build out pages quickly. These blocks can then be edited, reordered and personalized to specific customer segments – enabling our ability to personalize content.

Once those blocks have been created on a page, minimal development effort is required. By simplifying these day-to-day tasks, teams are now able to spend their time advancing our tech stack and design system.

Composable defines a modular ecosystem of technology and tools to offer flexibility, agility, and time-to-value for larger enterprises aiming to provide better customer journeys.

With a composable architecture, you can select the products that best suit your needs and easily integrate them with other products to build a stack.

Often a composable architecture is API-first to ensure applications in the composable stack can communicate with one another.

MACH stands for microservices, API-first, cloud-native, and headless. The MACH architecture is intended to "Future proof enterprise technology and propel current and future digital experiences"

M: Individual pieces of business functionality that are independently developed, deployed, and managed.

A: All functionality is exposed through an API.

C: SaaS that leverages the cloud, beyond storage and hosting, including elastic scaling and automatically updating.

H: Front-end presentation is decoupled from back-end logic and channel, programming language, and is framework agnostic.

DXP stands for digital experience platform, commonly an integrated and cohesive collection of tightly-coupled technologies, including content management, application delivery, search, commerce, and others.

More common legacy technology providers can be considered as DXPs, sometimes referred to as monolith applications.

Digital Experience Composition is an emerging category of tooling and platforms that raise the bar for all digital team members.

Platforms like Stackbit leverage API first "headless" and "composable" technology and tools and are dedicated to bringing together developers and code, content operators and content/assets, and designers and components/templates.

In bringing together these digital team members and their respective jobs to be done, Stackbit enables users at our customers to move to decoupled, fast, and cost-efficient application delivery.

Features of a DXC can include a no-code page builder experience, low-code front-end components and libraries, a template engine, and API integrations to underlying content and data providers, all in service of the development and maintenance of digital experiences.

Learn more from the Gartner Innovation Insight for Digital Experience Composition.

Published 28 July 2022 - ID G00770522

By Analyst(s): John Field, Mike Lowndes, Irina Guseva, Jim Murphy