What is MACH Architecture?
MACH is an acronym and it stands for:
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.
The concepts comes from MACH Alliance which is a not-for-profit industry body that advocates for open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystems. I think it's fair to say it' a "EDIFACT" type organization for the cloud/SAP BTP era with a compelling manifesto.
Figure source: https://machalliance.org/mach-technology
Why SAP BTP is the a place to implement MACH technology?
MACH technologies advocate for a composable enterprise in which every component is pluggable, scalable, replaceable, and can be continuously improved through agile development to meet evolving business requirements. But isn't this concept familiar with SAP BTP: "SAP Business Technology Platform is an innovation platform optimized for SAP applications in the cloud. SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) brings together application development and automation, data and analytics, integration, and AI capabilities in one unified environment"? Yes! SAP BTP is the place where you can easily implement MACH architecture but how to do it? We need to look at the "grand design" first.
Figure source: https://machalliance.org/mach-technology
As you can see the data layer which can take the events from SAP ERP system is decoupled from the APIs which are in turn exposed to the UI layer which can get changed at any given time to quarantine a headless front-end.
How to implement MACH with SAP BTP?
When we did our webinar "Future of integration with SAP BTP & Integration Suite!" a few months back we described the same concept implemented in SAP BTP without even knowing that we sticked to the MACH architecture but let me describe it here a bit more.
What you can see on the figure is the MACH implementation with SAP BTP - on one hand events from the emitter (SAP S/4HANA) are stored immediately in the Event Mesh/Advanced Event Mesh and the APIs (implemented with SAP Integration Suite) can change anytime without changing the underlaying events. APIs layer (again implemented with SAP Integration Suite) can be exposed to any UI frontends with SAP API management. This means that SAP BTP Integration Suite itself contains all MACH relevant components:
- Event Mesh/Advanced Event Mesh for storing events from SAP ERP
- SAP Cloud Integration (to building APIs working with the events)
- SAP API management - which can securely expose those APIs to any frontend UIs
How to test the MACH implementations effectively?
In case you'd like to make sure your Event Driven Architecture implementation is working for MACH architectures please visit my other blog on this topic: Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) performance testing for SAP Event Mesh
Conclusion
SAP BTP introduces many possibilities and many ways to work with integrations but organizations like MACH technology can lead the way for showing best practices for new, could native designs. If we can combine both: theory and practice we might be able to achieve the next level of adoption for both which in reality might bring the MACH manifesto more real (taking into account the number of SAP BTP customers. Special thanks to fredrik.borlie for introduction to the topic of MACH 🙂
References:
MACH Technology - MACH technology org page
Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) performance testing for SAP Event Mesh - blog on how to test MACH technology concepts with SAP BTP
Future of integration with SAP BTP & Integration Suite!" - webinar on MACH technology implementation with SAP BTP
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