Overview of the Micro-Frontend Architecture

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Micro-frontends
2. What are micro-frontends?
3. Motivations for micro-frontends
4. Fundamentals of micro-frontends
5. Trade-offs for micro-frontends
6. Conclusion

Introduction to Micro-frontends

In today's web development, we can find big and complex web applications and the need to be agile and scale are crucial.

With large development teams working simultaneously on multiple streams of work we seek ways to improve the ways we handle it.

To achieve this, many organizations have embraced a popular approach of breaking down monolithic applications into smaller components, primarily focusing on the backend. This architectural style is commonly known as micro-services.

However, dealing with large monolithic applications on the front end presents a challenge.

What are micro-frontends?

Micro-frontends is an architecture pattern that divides a web application into smaller, more manageable, independent and self-deployable units. Each of these units referred to as micro-frontends, represents a specific sub domain or functionality of the application.

Motivations for micro-frontends

As I mentioned before, a key motivation for micro-frontends is scalability. Combining the concepts of micro-services and micro-frontends, we can help create independent vertical slices, especially when considering it a subdomain from the front end to the back end. This approach empowers teams to work independently and autonomously, which fosters faster development and delivery of features and improvements.

Fundamentals of micro-frontends

The fundamental ideas behind micro-frontend architecture are:

• Modularity: Each micro-frontend is independently developed and deployable
• Resilience: Isolates the risk of failure to a smaller area
• Scalability: We can have multiple independent teams working simultaneously
• Smaller domains: This leads to faster development and easier understanding

Trade-offs for micro-frontends

When implementing the micro-frontend architecture, it's essential to consider various aspects of development and the trade-offs.

• Development Overhead: The micro-frontend architecture introduces additional complexity in the development process due to the need to manage multiple independent codebases
• Dependency Management: Coordinating and managing dependencies between different micro-frontends
• Consistency: Ensuring a consistent user experience and design across micro-frontends
• Testing: Testing micro-frontends, especially end-to-end testing, can be more complex due to multiple independent components
• Complexity: Coordinating the deployment of multiple micro-frontends and managing versioning during deployment
• Learning Curve: Introducing the micro-frontend architecture may require additional training and familiarization for development teams
• Cross-Cutting Concerns: Implementing cross-cutting concerns like authentication, logging, and analytics across micro-frontends
• Security Concerns: Security considerations, such as protecting sensitive data or handling user authentication
• Data Sharing: Ensuring efficient data sharing and communication between micro-frontends
• Code Duplication: Some level of code duplication might occur across micro-frontends
• Deployment and Rollback: Coordinating the deployment of multiple micro-frontends and managing rollback procedures can be more involved than with monolithic applications.
• Debugging Complexity: Debugging issues that span multiple micro-frontends can be more complex and time-consuming.

Conclusion

In this post we learnt what are micro-frontends, their motivations and the fundamental ideas behind it. In the next series we will deep dive in all the trade-offs, and will do an actual implementation.