What are Micro Frontends?

Jonatan Salas

16 June, 2019 - 2 min read

Micro Frontend is an architectural style derived from Micro Service architecture. The core idea is to split monolithic frontends into smaller pieces that can be managed by specific product teams in an organization.

Using this architectural style for your frontend codebase, comes with the following benefits:

Incremental Adoption
Smaller decoupled codebases
Autonomous Teams
Independent Deployment

Incremental Adoption

A Micro Frontend architecture can be incrementally adopted in your organization. You can start by splitting a small part of your whole frontend, and creating a Product Team to maintain it and add incremental upgrades.

As time runs, you can keep iterating until the whole frontend ends itself composed for different micro frontends owned by different Product Teams.

Smaller decoupled codebases

Since the Micro Frontend architecture follows “divide and conquer”, your whole application when fully converted to micro frontends, will result in smaller decoupled codebases that will communicate each other.

Independent Deployment

Independent deployment

Before of having micro-frontends you’ll have a single monolithic application that will be deployed once a list of features were developed by different teams. Now, each Product Team owns the deployment, so, they can deploy their micro-frontend all the time they want to do it.

Autonomous Teams

Since each Team owns a small piece of the whole app which is fully focused on solving a specific part of a big trouble, they become autonomous about how they code, the frameworks they use, how and when to deploy, roadmaps to deliver new features on their product, etc.