Web Development By DevTechToday June 7, 2022

Should You Be Moving Towards Micro Frontend?

In general when the team size is small and the final product is complex, developing the front-end of your page or app can be really difficult.  We have seen that unless the project is relatively small, numerous developers are likely to be working on the same single and indivisible block of code while developing a web app or single-page application. This is due to the fact that many frontend frameworks use a monolithic architecture pattern – micro frontend, in which all of the functionality is contained in one area. Communication problems among teams and poor DevOps practices can be arrived at from such practices. It all can lead to slowing down the process of testing and deployment and misses the upcoming deadlines too.

Here “Micro frontend” comes into the picture as they are a modern answer to this problem. Which is a front-end monolith architecture divided and broken down into more manageable components in this section. Each component serves a distinct purpose and is not dependent on the others. This results in a more dynamic, flexible frontend framework in which teams may focus on their own part of the system, reducing the likelihood of errors.

We’ve compiled a detailed brief about what a micro frontend is and a list of the advantages and downsides of micro frontends to assist you to decide whether or not to use them.

By the end of this article, you will have a better understanding of:

  • A brief of micro frontends
  • Micro-frontends’ advantages
  • Micro-frontends’ drawbacks

What is a Micro-frontend?

Micro frontends are a form of microservices design in which Micro frontends are a form of microservices design in which front-end functionality is enhanced. As a result, micro frontends provide a number of advantages, such as deployment independence and faster feature testing. There is no surprise that micro-frontends are becoming increasingly popular for developing web-based apps. Micro frontends have already been adopted by certain major corporations, such as IKEA and Spotify.

In 2020 Zack Jackson outlined this style of frontend development in his paper Module Federation and it became popular. Jackson explained how isolated or remote components may be developed and distributed independently, without the need for an existing monolith to house them.

Micro frontends enable you to create a less complex and time-consuming architecture. The micro frontend technique, in an instance, allows you to divide an entire program into small, independent sections. Each of them will be implemented by a variety of frontend teams and technologies. The same scalability, flexibility, and adaptability as the backend microservice architecture are maintained. Furthermore, you can blend micro frontend components created using libraries or multiple frameworks on the same web page using this approach. As a result, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that micro frontends have become a popular trend in the IT community and that this approach is being progressively adopted.

Micro frontend strategy has various advantages, including the ability for multiple teams to work on the frontend simultaneously without obstructing one another, as well as the ability to quickly version and customize components.

Micro Frontend Advantages:

1. Independent installation and testing:

Only the components that the team has created are deployed. Because the frontends are separate, deployment and other changes can only affect that microservice, not the entire system. This also means that teams are only responsible for testing and monitoring one part of the whole project, avoiding the requirement to monitor and test the entire project at the same time. 

2. Independent deployment:

Your micro frontend’s distribution will have no effect on the rest of the project. The adjustments will only affect the component of the business process that they have touched.

3. Scalability:

If your app or page is complicated, you’ll have to scale it over time. If the project’s resources allow for many teams, these teams can work on and build their respective frontend sections with incremental upgrades, resulting in the app scaling at a sustainable rate over time with different teams accountable for their own assigned micro frontend implementations.

4. Performance:

We all know that traditional web development frequently necessitates repeated requests to load all of a page’s components. So to improve site performance, the micro frontend method allows you to wait to load these other modules until they are needed.

5. Experts can be hired more easily:

Micro frontends hire people to work on a specific portion of an app where a certain tech stack is utilized, thus they don’t need to be familiar with technologies used by other teams.

Micro Frontend Disadvantages:

1. Complex testing of the entire application:

It can be more difficult to get a complete view of your app now that it dynamically loads material. Although each front end can be separately tested, a real-world user test is required to ensure that the software works for the intended audience. You can utilize typical black-box end-to-end testing with tools like Selenium or Cypress because it is agnostic to implementation specifics.

2. The wide range of criteria you must adhere to:

Because the application is divided down into smaller components, it can be difficult to keep all developers on the same page. It’s vital to have everyone on the same page in order to deliver a high-quality user experience.

3. With a small group, it’s not worth the effort:

We can say that a micro frontend is a great alternative for your project. Here the only key point that we need to keep in mind is that it is preferable for a small front end team for an effective outcome rather than

Micro frontends are a good alternative if your project is huge and you have more than one front-end team, but they are not at all worthwhile for a small team rather than a huge team.

Conclusion:

Thus we say that Micro frontend can be considered as an exciting opportunity through which we can shape into various areas of improvement for a young architecture for boosting corporate growth around the world. At last Whether or not you should use micro frontends is very dependent on your business type. You would not find any justification for a small team or a task in micro frontend architecture. Micro frontend applications, on the other hand, benefit huge projects with distributed teams and a significant number of requests. As a result, many huge companies are now using micro frontend architecture, and you should consider it as well.

Also, Micro Frontends is a fantastic component approach for changing how you build software and deploy it incrementally and often. In the future it can be a game-changer for huge organizations, allowing for continuous delivery. It also gives a viable option for fast-growing startups as a scalable and adaptable architecture.