Micro Frontends, Microservice Architecture Technique on Frontend

As we all know microservices are an architectural approach for scalable systems, it is mostly used for the backend but now as the frontend applications are becoming bigger and complex this approach is now can also be used for frontend applications, with the help of which different teams will be building one application with different JavaScript frameworks.

The idea of the micro frontend is to build a powerful and feature-rich browser application, i.e. a single page application which sits on the microservice architecture.

Monolith Frontend Architecture

Monolith frontend architectural approach is very simple, where one frontend team will create and maintain the frontend application which communicates with backend REST API services. The main problem with this approach is that as the application grows it is very difficult to scale it. The monolithic architectural approach doesn’t work perfectly for bigger web applications. Sometimes breaking the application in smaller modules with different frameworks becomes the requirement which is not possible with the monolithic approach.

Solution – Micro Frontends

The main idea with the Micro Frontend is to create an frontend application which is a combination of several different feature modules in which independent teams will work. They can either use same framework or can use different frameworks.

There are many companies which are using this kind of approach Spotify, Upwork, Klarna, etc are using micro frontend architectural approach for their web applications.

Implementing Micro-frontends

There are many ways to implement micro frontends:

• To combine multiple frameworks to a single page, Single-SPA meta framework can be used.
• Using web components as an integration layer between different micro apps.
• To integrate different micro apps we can use Varnish Cache.
• To communicate between different micro frontend modules we can create a shared event bus eg. chrisdavies/eev.

If you have an application which grows with the time then you can think of micro fronted architecutre, else monolithic approcah is good enough for smaller applications.