Netlify’s Chris Bach on the State of MACH and Composable
Netlify co-founder says the composable ecosystem must mature beyond its developer-led roots and target business outcomes
Chris Bach is a lot of things.
Co-Founder, Chief Strategy Officer, and Creative Officer at Netlify. Angel investor. Member of seven advisory boards. Co-inventor of the term Jamstack, which paved the way for today’s ecosystem of composable architecture. And co-creator of a fund that’s investing $10 million in startups to fuel the next wave of composable innovation.
So when Bach sat down with Composable.com for 15 minutes in Las Vegas a few months ago, we were all ears. Amid the hubbub of Shoptalk, we tucked into the quiet oasis of a Mandalay Bay coffeehouse to talk shop about headless and composable technology.
As slot machines chimed off in the distance, Bach explained why MACH and composable aren’t the big gamble some skeptics think they are. He’s not just rolling the dice on those two architectural frameworks; he’s all-in.
Here is Chris Bach’s take on how headless and composable have evolved thus far, and the direction he thinks they need to go in next.
How composable is evolving
Though Bach marvels at the uptake of headless and composable architectures over the past eight years, he says the technology must eventually mature beyond its developer-centric origins.
“We’ve seen this (evolve) from being a grassroots, developer-only led movement in technology to really sort of becoming something that enterprises are adopting at scale. However, that means it’s not just the developer that’s being catered to – we also need to cater to enterprise architects and marketers and so on.”
That’s where some of the growing pains arise. Meeting the needs of non-developers means headless and composable technologies must interact with more disparate sources of content and data.
“In this world of composable architecture, for example, a no-code visual editing experience is no longer done by just a monolith,” Bach says. “Instead, you want that experience to pull from several different content sources. But companies today will have multiple ones.”
Tapping into all those varied sources can muddy the entire process, according to Bach.
“You have content sources that are old from the monolithic past. You have databases in your basement that you’d like to make into APIs because there’s still valuable data there. And you have, of course, all the new systems as well. So how can you pull them in and, at the same time, cater to enterprise architects and marketers?” Bach asks.
For Netlify, he says, the answer was Gatsby.
The Gatsby acquisition
In February, Netlify announced its acquisition of Gatsby, creator of the Gatsby open source front-end framework. Despite headlines like “Netlify Acquires Gatsby, Its Struggling Jamstack Competitor,” Bach characterizes the transaction differently.
“Two years ago, Gatsby saw that this layer was needed for enterprises to be successful at scale with composable architecture. They started making this agnostic JavaScript framework. So we decided, ‘Let’s bring it into Netlify and take this to market together,’” he says.
Gatsby also runs a cloud platform for web delivery and content orchestration, as well as Valhalla, a centralized repository for managing content across multiple sources. Remember the friction around pulling content from multiple sources? Bach says Gatsby helps Netlify address that pain point.
“If we could merge the best-in-class content federation or content standardization play of Valhalla, and put that into a Netlify workflow, then we’d actually have an offering that would solve a lot of those things.”
Turning to the broader future of MACH and composable, however, Bach feels there are still more things to solve for.
The future of MACH and composable
Our 15 minutes are almost up. As coffee cups are cleared from the table, the conversation circles back to Bach’s contention that a maturing composable ecosystem must sharpen the focus of its lens on business outcomes.
“Again, when we started this it was developer-led. It was about breaking new ground from a technological point of view, not necessarily about carrying business results forward,” he says.
While Bach feels that shift is definitely underway right now, he believes everyone in the composable ecosystem – businesses, vendors, systems integrators – should continually educate themselves (and each other) about what composable can do, when it’s a good fit, how to undertake a composable journey, and who can help with that journey.
That’s why Netlify joined the MACH Alliance as a member in the enabler category. Bach sits on the alliance’s executive board. He says its educational efforts and standardized membership criteria (he points out only 50 percent of applicants meet those criteria) can help businesses cut through the vendor hype and marketing messages that envelop every emerging tech trend.
“The sort of guidance that the alliance provides becomes really important and we’ve seen tremendous traction with it,” he says.
What about the skeptics who still think composable is a big gamble? Bach believes the diminishing returns they get from playing the same monolith slot machine will eventually prove too costly for them.
“If they get far enough in their research, they’ll see there are so many things that a monolith can’t provide,” Bach says. “On average, 40 percent of IT budgets go towards upgrades. You’re paying for upgrades, but you’re not getting anything in return.
“Monoliths are so expensive to keep going,” he concludes, “that the price of doing nothing is actually too high.”
Our coffee is finished. But Chris Bach is just getting started.
Christine Wong
Senior Technology Staff Writer, Orium
I've been telling enterprise technology stories for almost three decades in print, online, and on television. I started out in journalism, covering the telecom boom, the birth of social media and the emergence of digital commerce. I'm always looking for the human angle in every technology story I write.