Adoption of micro-frontends is growing
However clear patterns and best practices don't seem to be quite there yet!
This week i was reading this interesting survey about the state of frontend development and to my surprise, it contained an entry about micro-frontends!
This is a sign that it is becoming a recognized and established pattern in the industry.
Micro Frontends are embraced by a variety of companies nowadays. Among others, Netflix, PayPal, and Amex have implemented this architecture approach in some of their systems. I’m convinced that this is the right path for micro-frontends maturity. Large corporations embracing this architecture will only provide a faster feedback loop for the community highlighting best practices and anti-patterns.
However i still think that despite this growth there are still many naive implementations going around that ignore most of the trade-offs and perils that can happen with this type of architecture.
When moving to a micro-frontends architecture we need to consider that everything needs to run together in the same browser and provide a cohesive and consistent experience to the user, these factors pose some of the most important trade-offs in these architectures. I plan to write more about this in the future. Stay Tuned!
Interesting content this week:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/server-side-rendering-micro-frontends-the-architecture/
Very interesting article about server rendering micro-frontends in AWS, however like many articles in this space it tells you how to render and stitch multiple independent applications together, but it doesn’t talk about how to isolate them from each other in runtime and the trade-offs of the different strategies to make that happen.
The approach showcased is very good and contains important concepts such as service discovery, which is something that is not very discussed in this domain, but essential for independent deployments. I’m really looking forward to see more articles about this particular topic.
Interesting talk about bringing micro-frontends to react-native! Haven’t tried this in practice however it seems very promising. Native apps are traditionally stuck in a single build and deployment pipeline, so this has the potential to accelerate mobile development and help scale these applications.
https://www.nearform.com/blog/react-micro-frontends-module-federation/
Good article from Nearform, a resume of many of the concepts involved in a micro-frontends architecture, and a showcase of an implementation using module federation
https://blog.cloudflare.com/fragment-piercing/
This article showcases a very cool and novel approach for incremental adoption of a micro-frontends architecture, the example showcased is built on top of cloudflere workers however i can see this working with most cloud providers as well. My only pet-peeve is about the examples showcasing the usage of multiple different frameworks in the same page. This in my opinion is a big anti-pattern but that doesn’t take away value from the incremental adoption approach demonstrated which seems very good.