This article was originally posted by VTEX's founder and co-CEO, Mariano Gomide de Faria on Linkedin.
The MACH Alliance emerged with noble intentions, promising to break the stranglehold of monolithic platforms through its gospel of Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless architectures. Its vision of modular commerce—stitching together 'best-of-breed' solutions—appeared revolutionary at first glance (and it has been for some). But what began as a technical liberation movement has instead led us down a treacherous path paved with hidden costs, operational nightmares, unfulfilled promises, and financial ruin.
The Emperor's New Architecture
Let's be brutally honest: The pure best-of-breed MACH approach has created as many problems as it has solved. What began as a crusade for technical freedom has morphed into a complex web of challenges:
The Integration Puzzle
Organizations are drowning in a sea of APIs, wrestling with dozens of vendors, and burning countless hours building sophisticated API mediation layers in an attempt to make disparate services play nicely together. The promise of seamless integration has revealed itself as a mirage, with teams struggling to maintain data consistency and reliable workflows across an ever-expanding maze of services. Each new integration adds another layer of complexity, creating a fragile ecosystem where a single change can trigger a cascade of failures.
The Hidden Cost Epidemic
The "best-of-breed" narrative conveniently ignores the crippling reality of managing multiple vendor relationships, each with its own licensing fees, support contracts, and infrastructure requirements. Implementing highly customized solutions distracts businesses from their core operations, as they essentially need to build a software company within their organization. What appears cost-effective in initial evaluations reveals itself as a financial black hole, with costs multiplying across development, maintenance, and ongoing operations. The true price becomes apparent not just in direct costs but in the opportunity cost of delayed market initiatives and reduced business agility.
The Operational Quagmire
Perhaps most devastating is the operational burden placed on business users who must navigate a labyrinth of disconnected tools and interfaces. For the largest organizations, millions of dollars are spent constructing custom business user experiences and integrated workflows across their ecosystem of commerce apps. For everyone else, digital marketers waste precious time switching between systems, merchandisers struggle to maintain consistent product experiences, and content teams battle fragmented workflows that kill productivity. This disjointed experience creates organizational friction that directly impacts business performance – from higher employee training and onboarding costs to delayed campaign launches to the inability to respond to competitive threats quickly. Additionally, the promise of AI-driven innovation can be difficult to unlock as valuable data remains trapped in silos, making it challenging to deliver the personalized experiences that modern commerce demands.
The Security and Privacy Nightmare
Organizations using fully best-of-breed architectures quickly drown in data replication. The same data object is replicated through multiple systems. Additionally, multiple technology vendors have access to sensitive data that can compromise the system; legislation and regulators are behind in enforcing data privacy standards, leaving many holes in the tech stack that can be exploited.
A future-proof commerce tech stack guarantees a simple data strategy, delivering an architecture that can ensure the highest standard of security, from PCI to privacy regulators. The ultimate reason fully composable architectures, such as those promoted by the MACH alliance, falter is that they require an enormous effort to standardize and audit the security practices across dozens of vendors.
In a connected digital ecosystem, trusted networks or technology backbones will become essential. Fully composable architectures, as currently implemented by system integrators, will struggle to provide truly out-of-the-box connected experiences since their business incentives depend heavily on costly customizations and integrations. This profit-driven approach to integrations directly opposes the goal of architectural simplicity.
MACH: From Buzzword to a Bloodbath for the Bottom Line
Here's the inconvenient truth: MACH principles are no longer special; they're table stakes for modern web application development. The real challenge isn't achieving a MACH architecture; it's delivering business value. The e-commerce industry needs to stop fetishizing architectural ideals and start focusing on what matters: business outcomes.
The future lies in MACH-based architectures that are:
- Pragmatic: Only using (and paying for) best-of-breed when there’s a clear, measurable ROI
- Outcome-Oriented: Designed with clear KPIs and business objectives in mind.
- Human-Centric: Prioritizing the needs of end-users, from developers to digital marketers and merchandisers to end-user customers.
- Flexible but Practical: Offering modularity where it matters and standardization where it simplifies.
What to avoid in a fully best-of-breed architecture:
- Silos: a software that serves as a “Silo” for one specific business area
- Data replication: an architecture where the functioning needs the system to replicate, several times, the same data object. The quality of a Mach architecture can be analyzed by how many times the same data is found in multiple systems
- Ego-driven decision: If the new vendor (software or agent) does not aggregate clear results for revenue increase or efficiency gains.
The Path Forward
An effective digital commerce architecture demands the thoughtful application of composable commerce principles that deliver a full and natively connected ecosystem. Organizations need solutions that are:
- Ruthlessly Practical: Delivering immediate business value without technical gymnastics.
- Sustainably Operated: Manageable by normal teams with reasonable skills.
- Outcome driven: Providing clear ROI without hidden cost traps.
- OOTB connected to backbones: The architecture is dependent on OOTB connections between vendors with no or limited customer integrations maintained by the customer
The Next Era of Commerce Tech
It's time to abandon the dogmatic pursuit of full, best-of-breed composable commerce. Instead, let's embrace a new paradigm that:
- Prioritizes business outcomes over technical ideals.
- Accepts that some "best-of-breed" solutions are actually bad for business.
- Recognizes that the most elegant architecture is the one that delivers results.
The MACH Alliance served its purpose in breaking us free from monolithic thinking. Now it's time to break free from MACH dogma itself. The future belongs to organizations that can balance technical capability with business reality, creating solutions that don't just work in theory but deliver in practice. The future is based on highly connected (OOTB connections) backbones that provide a sustainable, reliable, and business-driven solution.
Let's stop chasing composable extremism and start building solutions that work for business.