Is microfrontends really a thing to get started and choose it for a production ready case?
Micro Frontends is an approach that extends the concept of microservices to frontend development.
So similar to microservices, front-end is separated into different sections such that each section is an independent front-end and can have it's own technology, tools, deployment. Finally, all the front-ends are combined as needed by let's say by a parent front-end or master front-end.
As frontend applications have grown in complexity, the monolithic architecture, where the entire frontend is a single codebase, can become challenging to maintain and scale. To address these challenges, the concept of microfrontends has emerged. A microfrontend architecture allows different parts of the frontend to be built, deployed, and scaled independently, much like microservices on the backend.
When evaluating whether to transition to a microfrontend architecture, several critical factors should be weighed. These factors will help you determine if the benefits of microfrontends align with your application's needs and organizational goals.
Consideration: Microfrontends shine in environments where multiple teams work on different parts of the frontend simultaneously. Each team can develop, deploy, and manage their own section independently.
Impact: If your teams are already structured around specific modules or features, microfrontends could enhance autonomy and reduce inter-team dependencies.
Consideration: As your application grows, maintaining and scaling a single codebase can become increasingly challenging. Microfrontends allow for more granular scaling, enabling teams to scale only the parts of the application that need it.
Impact: If you expect significant growth or need to scale certain modules independently, microfrontends could provide a more scalable solution.
Consideration: Microfrontend architecture can add complexity to your deployment pipeline, as each frontend module may require its own deployment process.
Impact: Assess whether your team is equipped to handle the increased deployment complexity or if your current CI/CD setup can be adapted to manage multiple frontends efficiently.
Consideration: One of the challenges with microfrontends is managing shared components or utilities across different modules. While microfrontends promote independence, they can lead to code duplication if not managed properly.
Impact: Evaluate whether the benefits of independent modules outweigh the potential difficulties in maintaining shared code.
Consideration: Microfrontends can introduce performance overhead, particularly if different parts of the application load separate JavaScript bundles. Careful planning is needed to avoid negatively impacting the user experience.
Impact: Consider how critical performance is for your application and whether the potential overhead of microfrontends would be acceptable.
Consideration: While microfrontends can improve maintainability by isolating concerns, they also require a more complex architectural setup. This can lead to higher maintenance costs in the long term.
Impact: Consider whether your team has the capacity to manage the additional complexity over time or if the simplicity of your current modular setup is preferable.
This comparison will help illustrate the trade-offs involved in moving to a microfrontend approach.
Traditional React architecture already offers a good level independence and modularity. Microfrontends would increase this independence and modularity even more but at the cost of added complexity in managing shared resources and dependencies.
While microfrontends offer greater autonomy in development, they require a higher degree of discipline in managing versions compatibility, dependencies, and integration. For a small team, the overhead might outweigh the benefits.
The move to microfrontends would increase deployment flexibility but also significantly increase the complexity of the build and deployment pipelines. For small team, managing this complexity could be challenging.
If performance is a critical concern, microfrontends might introduce new challenges, particularly around managing and optimizing multiple independent bundles. Your current setup might be more performance-efficient unless the application needs extreme modularity.
For a small team, maintaining a microfrontend architecture could lead to more overhead and potential inconsistency across different parts of the application. The existing setup might be easier to maintain and standardize.
Traditional Modular React Architecture: Offers simplicity, centralized control, and easier maintenance, with enough modularity to allow separate deployments. Best suited for small to medium-sized teams and applications with centralized dependencies.
Microfrontend Architecture: Provides greater independence, scalability, and flexibility at the cost of increased complexity in development, deployment, and maintenance. Typically more suitable for larger teams and complex applications that require significant modularity and autonomy.
This comparison suggests that while microfrontends offer several advantages, the complexity they introduce may not be justified given a small team size, structure, and application architecture. Sticking with current modular React setup seems like a more balanced approach for this situation.
Impact: Each module (or microfrontend) can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. This allows teams to work autonomously without waiting for changes in other parts of the application.
Use Case: This is particularly beneficial if your application evolves to a point where different teams or developers need to work on different parts of the application simultaneously without stepping on each other’s toes.
Impact: Microfrontends can scale more granularly. For example, you could scale a heavily used module without affecting the rest of the application.
Use Case: If your application experiences uneven load distribution across modules, microfrontends could allow you to optimize resource allocation more effectively.
Impact: Smaller, independent deployments can result in faster release cycles, as each microfrontend can be updated without requiring a full application deployment.
Use Case: This is advantageous in a scenario where frequent updates or feature releases are needed for specific parts of the application.
Impact: Microfrontends introduce significant complexity in terms of development, build, and deployment processes. Managing multiple codebases, ensuring consistency, and handling shared dependencies can be challenging.
Downside: For a small team, this complexity might result in slower development cycles and increased overhead, potentially offsetting the benefits.
Impact: The need to load multiple microfrontend bundles at runtime can lead to increased HTTP requests, potential duplication of dependencies, and longer load times.
Downside: This can negatively impact user experience, especially if not managed carefully. Performance optimization becomes more complex, requiring more advanced techniques to maintain acceptable load times.
Impact: Maintaining consistency across multiple independent microfrontends can be difficult, especially in terms of UI components, styling, and shared utilities.
Downside: Over time, this could lead to fragmentation and increased technical debt, making the application harder to maintain and evolve.
Impact: Adopting a microfrontend architecture requires familiarity with new tools and practices, such as module federation, independent deployment pipelines, and cross-module communication.
Downside: For a small team, the time and effort required to get up to speed with these new tools might outweigh the potential benefits, especially if your team is already productive with the current setup.
Recommendation Stay with the Current Modular React Architecture: Given a small team size and the existing modular structure of application, the traditional architecture appears to be well-suited to your needs. It offers sufficient flexibility, ease of maintenance, and lower complexity, which are crucial for a small team.
Consider Microfrontends in Specific Scenarios: If your team grows or if your application’s requirements change—such as needing more granular scaling, more independent deployments, or if you face significant challenges with your current architecture—microfrontends could then be reevaluated as a potential solution.
Next Steps
It's theoretically a good concept on paper, but lacks practical implementation challenges.
Microservices works well for backend but on front-end everything ultimately falls under one umbrella so we always need a master front-end. Hence, instead of microservices like concept, it becomes more of a master slaves kind of architecture.
These are my thoughts on the subject. Thanks for reading along.
Let me know your feedback/suggestions in the comments.
- Ayush 🙂