What is MASA – Mesh App and Service Architecture?

MASA is a new architectural model introduced by Gartner which stands for Mesh app and service architecture. It reflects what has emerged over the last five years, as organizations have experimented with several digital projects. In the race to digital transformation, MASA focuses on enabling rich, fluid, and dynamic connections of people, processes, services, content, devices, and things.

Mesh app and service architecture enables the digital business technology platform within organizations. This model is in many ways similar to the Axway Customer Experience Networks.

MASA mesh is based on a multidimensional model where an application is an interconnected mesh of independent and autonomous apps and services. Hence the name. It often incorporates functionality from other applications to create its own functionality that is shared in turn with external systems via APIs.

A MASA application covers a specific process or activity. It is made of several apps and services. Each app serves the need of a specific user persona within the process/activity. For example, if you take the Uber application, there are two different apps: “Uber for travelers” and “Uber for drivers.” We should also consider how the different channels — such as mobile, connected things, social media, partners — interact with those apps and contribute to the global application.

Requirements for Building a MASA Mesh Application

• Cloud-native: need to be hosted on the Cloud to benefit native elasticity and high availability.
• Web-scale: need to address the volume of Internet traffic, which is potentially huge; it needs to scale with the growth of new devices (such as IoT or VRA).
• Modular: need to work with modular services that can be developed individually with no cross-dependencies.
• Adaptive: need to react dynamically to more and more rapid digital business changes.

It also contributes to the participation of a larger digital business ecosystem by offering:

• a fluid omnichannel user experience.
• APIs to connect with the digital ecosystem.
• greater customer intimacy by leveraging analytics.
• modern applications that differ from the legacy back-end systems but communicate smoothly with them.

Technologies Supporting MASA

• App development tools, including MADP
• API Management solutions (such as Amplify Platform)
• Microservice frameworks
• Analytics engines (such as Axway Decision Insight)
• Container engines and container management systems (such as Docker)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) (such as Axway Cloud Platform)