Over the past decade, micro frontend development has evolved significantly. What began as simple and static pages has now drastically transformed into some complex, large-scale applications managed by multiple teams. As organizations grow over time, so do their web platforms. These often result in monolithic frontends, which are very hard to scale, maintain, and deploy. However, to address these significant challenges, the concept of micro frontend architecture has emerged over time.
While the microfrontend extends the overall philosophy of different microservices to the frontend, the architecture enables teams to break down a large yet simple user interface into smaller, manageable, and independently deployable pieces. This approach furthermore empowers organizations to achieve greater scalability, speed, and flexibility, all of which are very crucial in fast-paced digital environment.
Micro Frontend and Its Concept
Before seeking the answer to what is micro frontend architecture, it is necessary to get an overview of the core concept. Micro frontend is an innovative architectural approach where a web application’s frontend is divided into smaller, independent modules. But each of those is built, deployed, and maintained separately. However, instead of using a single large frontend codebase, different teams can easily develop individual components using different technologies.
Then, these modules are combined seamlessly into a unified user interface. This approach not only improves scalability but also speeds up the whole development and allows for independent updates without bringing any effect to the entire app. Primarily, microfrontend follows the same principles as microservices, making large applications much more flexible and easier to manage.
The Architecture of Micro-Frontend
What is micro frontend architecture? Micro frontend architecture is an advanced design approach that splits a large frontend application into multiple smaller, independent micro-apps. Each micro-frontend is highly responsible for a specific feature or section of the user interface.
Additionally, when these micro-apps are integrated, they can provide a seamless user experience. This architecture also enables teams to work independently, release updates more quickly, and scale specific parts of the application without affecting others. Thus, it turned out to be ideal for some complex and enterprise-level web applications.
Key Benefits of Adopting Micro Frontend
Every day, a new JavaScript technology is invented and used in various applications. But the surprising factor is that the technology is evolving faster than ever. However, the technology can also be frustrating, and JavaScript has its own pros and cons.
Here are some of the benefits:
1. Support Code and Style Isolation
Each team can easily choose its own technology stack, ensuring a greater flexibility and reduced dependency on specific technologies.
2. Independent Development and Deployment Independence
Teams can also work independently on different modules, enable faster development besides allowing stronger deployment cycles.
3. Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
The architecture facilitates automated deployment, ensuring different updates and new features are delivered quickly and reliably.
4. Simplified Testing
Testing is also isolated to some smaller modules, so even the smaller changes don’t require retesting the entire application.
5. Front-end Renovation
Introducing some new features or making significant changes is easier without disrupting the entire system.
6. High Resilience and Better Maintenance
The modular structure enables improved fault isolation and facilitates easier maintenance over time.
Why Microservices are Essential for Frontend?
When working on both large and distributed web applications, it makes strong sense to adopt a microservice-based architecture. This approach enables the monolithic team to split into independent teams, thereby improving scalability and reducing code complexity as each team focuses on a specific feature of the business application.
The same concept applies to the strong front-end architecture. It will be part of the same individual team that builds the microservice backend. Each team wins a unique business component and develops an end-to-end solution, spanning from the user interface to the database layer.
Choosing the micro frontend architecture offers several advantages:
1. Technology Flexibility
The architecture offers greater flexibility, allowing individual teams to select the latest technology stack for each microservice. This, in turn, improves and accelerates the overall development cycle with enhanced features.
2. Faster and Isolated Development and Deployment
The development process also improves significantly by adopting its microfrontend architecture. As with this architecture, you can have smaller, independent teams that work on different features, making the process faster.
3. Individual Testing and Fewer Regression Issues
With isolated teams on the front end, the development, testing, and deployment cycles become significantly smoother, enabling the creation of strong and resilient applications.
4. Maintainability
In the case of front end system design, monolithic applications are also very hard to maintain. Built from smaller parts, it helps with maintainability and facilitates a more manageable approach. This also ensures that smaller, easily testable features can be tested quickly and reduces overall testing time.
5. Scalability
Furthermore, the modular and decoupled micro frontend architecture allows better scaling across multiple teams. New front end elements also do not affect the other parts, allowing teams with different backgrounds and skills to focus on continuous growth.
Seamless Integration of Micro Frontend in Development
In case of micro frontend implementation, the microfrontend provides the best practices, strategies, and strong recipes for building a modern and smart web application with multiple teams using different JavaScript frameworks. However, the main concept behind its architecture is as follows:
1. Be Technology Independent
Each team should pick and focus on upgrading their tech stack without coordinating with other teams. Thus, the custom elements help to hide the implementation details besides providing a neutral interface to others.
2. Isolate Team Code
Never share a runtime, even if different teams use the same framework. For a front end system design, focus on building an independent and self-contained application. Furthermore, avoid relying on shared state or global variables.
3. Create Team Prefixes
In the case of micro frontend implementation, use strong naming conventions where isolation is not yet possible. Namespace CSS, Local Storage, Events, and Cookies can help to avoid collisions and clarify ownership.
4. Favour Native Browser Features over Custom APIs
Instead of building a global PubSub system, use the browser events for better communication. If a cross-team API needs to be built, try to keep the custom APIs as simple as possible.
5. Build a Resilient Web design
The features should remain very useful even if the JavaScript fails to execute. To improve a strong and perceived performance, use some universal rendering and progressive enhancement.
Best Practices for Micro Frontend
In case of micro frontend best practices, there are different practices to implement the micro frontend architecture:
1. Single SPA Meta-Framework
The Single SPA meta-framework combines various frameworks, such as React, Vue, Angular 1, and Angular 2, on the same page without requiring a page refresh.
2. Multiple Single-Page Applications (SPA) at Different URLs
For some shared functionality applications, use NPM or Bower components to help manage dependencies across different SPAs.
3. Isolating Micro Apps into Iframes
Utilize the Windows PostMessage APIs and multiple libraries to facilitate easy communication between Iframes. IFrames can also help to share APIs that are usually exposed by their parent window.
4. Shared Event Bus for Communication
Use different modules to communicate over a shared event bus. Furthermore, these modules work on their own framework and handle both the incoming and outgoing events properly.
5. Component Libraries
Depending on the main app’s stack, the tech stack helps to develop multiple components and app sections as libraries, which are denoted as “required” in the main app. Hence, the main app becomes a modern composition of different components.
The Don’ts of Micro Frontends
While micro frontends are powerful, misuse can lead to unnecessary complexity. Here are some critical don’ts:
1. Over Engineering
Avoid creating an excessive number of microfrontend because it becomes very critical to strike a perfect balance between modularity and complexity.
2. Shared State Complexity
It is advisable to avoid too complicated shared state management. Consider the Redux, MobX, or shared state libraries as easy solutions. You can also create your own pub-sub or post message service. Also, focus on implementation or state planning more than the tool to transfer different states.
3. Inadequate Version Control
Failure to provide the necessary version control might result in some serious compatibility concerns and code clashes within the micro frontend architecture.
4. Inconsistent UI
Inconsistent UI can also mislead users, in addition to degrading the overall user experience. It also forces developers to recreate the same thing multiple times, which can cause a significant burden on development costs.
5. Communication breakdown
Do not segregate teams working on various micro frontends. Encourage strong and easy communication and teamwork. Remember that missing communication often leads to duplication of work. This is also considered as micro frontend best practices.
6. Failure to Test
A failure to test your project also leads to a failed project- it may be a bold statement, but it’s true. For those who want to gain a clear understanding, a failed test often results in faulty micro frontends and serious compatibility concerns.
Steps to Successfully Implement Micro Frontend
For a seamless micro frontend implementation, it is necessary to follow a few steps. From clearly dividing the application into independent and functional modules, to deploy and manage each module separately is crucial. Let’s learn how –
Phase 1 –
1. Define your architecture and boundaries
Start with analysing and following the existing application. Then, identify all the logical and independent areas, and later split those into micro frontends.
2. Establish team structure
Create a core platform team to manage the overarching architecture and governance, while separate teams develop their respective micro frontends.
3. Choose a composition method
Select how micro frontends will be integrated, such as using JavaScript at runtime, server-side composition, or build-time integration.
4. Pick a shared design system
In the case of front end system design, standardize UI components, styles, and utilities to ensure consistency across micro frontends by developing a shared component library or using a common design system.
Phase 2 –
1. Isolate team code
Ensure teams can develop, test, and deploy their micro frontends independently as self-contained units.
2. Create a dependency management workflow
Establish a clear process for managing dependencies between different micro frontends.
3. Choose a codebase structure
For a front end system design, decide between a monorepo and distributed repositories.
4. Implement a unified build and deployment process
Use both the CI or CD pipelines that assist to automate the build, test, and deployment of each micro frontend.
5. Handle state and routing
Carefully plan for the easy state management and check for some proper routing across multiple applications.
Phase 3 –
1. Implement monitoring and error handling
Integrate latest monitoring tools and track the overall performance. Furthermore, implement some robust error handling for when a micro frontend fails to load.
2. Ensure security
While planning for the front end system design, address all the proper security considerations and focus on some easy integration points besides ensuring that the micro frontends are consumed securely.
3. Optimize performance
Regularly monitor an assured and strong performance, optimize strong individual components, and leverage caching and CDNs to improve the overall speed and reduce latency.
4. Document everything
Encourage some proper documentation of micro frontends, including the APIs, data flows, and integration points.
Scaling Frontend with Micro Frontend Architecture
Once you understand why to apply the micro frontend architecture, you’ll discover its future and how it helps scale multiple applications. To maintain proper control over the team’s code and ensure that work is properly allocated between different teams for a well-functioning architecture, first understand the best way to split the application’s codebase.
The codebase can also be easily split between multiple teams according to the vertical slices of business functionality, rather than the technical capabilities. Similarly, in the case of a vertical split, they prioritize different business domains and assign each domain to a separate team. There are also several ways to implement the modern micro frontend architecture, and the method you choose depends on the application’s overall needs.
1. Server-side Composition
With the server-side composition, a service typically sits between the browser and the application servers. However, using a smart server-side composition means that the page that reaches the customer’s browser is fully assembled and ready to display. The micro frontend is also cached at the CDN, and then it is successfully served to the client or user during the build time.
The server also successfully composes it into a clear view that is later served at build time, retrieves it, and then organizes and assembles the final page. This helps to increase the whole page load speed, which is significantly higher than that of pure client-side integration techniques. Additionally, it enhances the overall robustness of modern applications.
2. Build-time Integration
The build-time integration can be easily achieved using some advanced web components or any type of modern component-driven framework. One effective approach is to package the microfrontend as independent modules and include them as library dependencies within a container application.
This method enables integration during the build process while maintaining a completely decoupled build pipeline for each frontend. As a result, teams can collaborate efficiently and maximize code reuse. In the package.json file, the container application also assists with each micro frontend as a dependency, ensuring a seamless integration.
3. Runtime via JavaScript
The runtime integration approach bundles and configures the micro frontend at runtime. A package.json is not used to bundle the individual components. One way to implement runtime integration is via JavaScript. Runtime integration via JavaScript is the most flexible approach that teams use for implementing micro frontends.
In this approach, each micro frontend is incorporated into the page using a <script> tag. The script tag doesn’t render anything immediately upon load, but it attaches global functions as entry points. The container application then determines which components should be mounted and calls the relevant function to instruct them when and where to render themselves.
4. Runtime via Web Components
Another alternative for runtime integration is using web components. In runtime integration via web components, each micro frontend defines an HTML element for the container to represent an instance, rather than defining a global function that the container calls.
Web components are isolated, reusable components that can be used in HTML pages and web applications. These are also known as custom elements.
5. Runtime Via Frames
One of the simplest ways to compose the front end system design and application in the browser and build pages from autonomous sub-pages is through runtime integration via iframes. Developers can achieve better isolation in global variables and style with iframes.
IFrames, or inline frames, are HTML documents that can be easily embedded within another HTML document, making it very easy to build multiple pages from independent sub-pages.
Insights on Micro Frontend Architecture
It is necessary to ensure that the core and the integration are as simple as possible in micro frontend architecture. One of the critical challenges is to standardize the UI/UX principles. A universal solution is to use a style guide, such as Material Design or Bootstrap, among others. Similarly, effective communication with the team is crucial to ensuring everything runs smoothly. Furthermore, establishing some strong standards and modern rules can help to minimize conflicts between different teams working on the product.
Similarly, all these micro frontend architecture best practices help to solve a primary issue: scalability. As a smart application grows significantly, it introduces numerous issues related to microfrontend and conflicts. Moreover, by splitting the codebase across different teams and applying the right logistics, it is possible to deliver some high-quality, technology-trending, and fast solutions to the world.
Final Conclusion
Micro frontend architecture represents the natural evolution of frontend development, rather than an advanced step towards distributed, scalable, and modern, resilient systems. Furthermore, by breaking down some complex applications into some manageable units, organizations can gain greater flexibility to innovate more quickly, improve better performance, and scale efficiently.
However, the key to success lies in striking a perfect balance between independence and greater consistency, beside empowering teams to establish a unified brand and user experience.
Similarly, as the digital landscape continues to evolve, the micro frontend architecture plays a strong and pivotal role in shaping the overall future of enterprise-grade web applications, ensuring strong agility, greater efficiency, and long-term sustainability.
