This post is more educational than problem solving, but we want you, our clients and potential clients, to understand how we use best practices to build websites and what this means for you. We will break down the technical jargon into understandable and digestible bits and bytes. (computer joke 😊)
The Essential Components of MACH
305 Spin uses what is called MACH architecture when building websites. This innovative approach gives us the freedom to choose from the best tools on the market and maintain a structure that is easy to add, replace or remove these tools in the future.
MACH is an acronym that stands for:
- Microservices
- API First
- Cloud Native
- Headless
Think of MACH as building blocks for building a house, it helps to organize and design your website so it works seamlessly and can easily be upgraded. When talking about this for your website, we can use an e-commerce site as our example.
Microservices – Think of these like rooms in your house or specific components of your website. If you have a product catalog or shopping cart, those are microservices.
API First – API ties together all the different functions, in this house example, these are the doors that information flows through from room to room. API’s help different parts of your website work together seamlessly. With our e-commerce example this data from the catalog, flows into the shopping cart, and when the items are purchased, the data goes back to the catalog to update your inventory. The API calls may also include Fulfillment Centers, Shipping Services (like UPS, FedEx), Accounting applications and Customer Service.
Cloud Native – means your website is not tied to a specific location, like a physical server. All the components and data are “in the cloud.” The benefits of this are your site can easily scale to handle a lot of visitors, process a lot of data, as well as be more readily available across regional centers. Continuing with the house metaphor, this is the ability to have a party with all your friends and not run out of room. And for the website example, just think of black Friday or cyber-Monday usage surges.
Headless – sounds really odd, right? Like where are heads in websites? It actually means that what your users see, or the front-end of your website, is not tied to how your site works, which is what we call the back-end. You have the ability to make changes to the front without affecting the back-end operations, and vice-versa. Which is great because if a microservice, like your shopping cart or catalog, gets an upgrade it doesn’t affect your site overall.
To summarize, MACH is very flexible and efficient, each room does its job well and the doors connect everything smoothly and efficiently.
I’m sure you are still wondering what is the benefit of all this? Well, this enables us here at 305 Spin to build websites quickly that are agile and customer centric. Because of all the different components that are your site can grow with your business, or as we’ll call it your site is future proof.
Old vs New: A deeper dive into website construction and why MACH is the new way to go:
Older sites are called “Monolithic”, which is exactly as it sounds, one large integrated structure where there are no individual components to easily update if need be. To continue with the theme established above, the rooms and furniture are tightly integrated and if you change something, it might affect the entire building.
If your site is monolithic, you should consider upgrading it to a MACH based site. The benefits will be:
Improved speed with less risk. Using this agile architecture you get a faster route to MVP (minimum viable product) and to launch. This allows 305 Spin to update your site quickly if a component is improved and we can swap out pieces easily if need be.
Best of breed strategy – using components will give you the ability to have the best technology available, and we all know how quickly things change and are improved! This also allows you to keep something that is working well, and change/upgrade/add on other components. This is called composable architecture. More about that in another blog!
Upgrades – Above we talked about changing and upgrading is easier in a MACH designed system. When a new component is upgraded it won’t break your site. This is a very good thing. Again, building blocks and doors, if you change a block, it won’t change the other, because the walls keep everything independent and the information passes through the doors.
Seamless Customizations and Innovation – In our current climate it is very important to be able to make changes and upgrades quickly. This allows you to meet customers’ needs and expectations. Say you have a restaurant and online ordering, but you need to add curbside pick-up capabilities over the weekend, or launch a rebranded ordering experience for a high-profile, enterprise customer, MACH makes that possible.
The 305 Spin Advantage: Crafting Tailored Excellence for 30+ Years
Ready to refurbish your website and make it future proof? Maybe you need to upgrade some components to improve your customer satisfaction and boosts sales?? Partnering with experts is key to standing out in the competitive digital landscape. At 305 Spin, we are dedicated collaborators in creating a unique, scalable, e-commerce presence for your business.
Whether your company is a large corporation or a non-profit, we cater to a diverse range of clients. Our approach involves careful planning, agile development methodologies, and specialized expertise to ensure your platform operates seamlessly, providing a secure and user-friendly experience for your customers. 305 Spin’s team plays a crucial role in crafting an intuitive user experience (UX), addressing security concerns, and ensuring scalability to accommodate the growth of the business.
We can help build out your e-commerce site and help manage SEO so you can run your business and watch it grow. We have tools to monitor the user experience, deploy surveys and advise on solutions if any issues arise. We are your one stop shop for all aspects of your website.
Ready to elevate your website presence? Let’s discuss your website and how 305 Spin can help you achieve your goals.
