The ALMA Common Software (ACS) provides a software infrastructure common to all partners and consists of a documented collection of common patterns in and of components, which implement those patterns. The heart of ACS is an object model based on Distributed Objects (DOs), implemented as CORBA objects. The teams responsible for the control system's development use DOs as the basis for components and devices such as an antenna mount control.

ACS provides common CORBA-based services such as logging, error and alarm management, configuration database and lifecycle management. A code generator can create a Java Bean for each DO and programmers can write Java client applications by connecting those Beans with data-manipulation and visualization Beans.