Building Micro-Frontends, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. Micro-Frontend Architectures and Challenges

A micro-frontend represents a business subdomain that is autonomous, independently deliverable, built with the same or different technologies, has a low degree of coupling, and is owned by a single team.

Various types of micro-frontends offer many opportunities, and selecting the right type depends on the project requirements, organizational structure, and developers’ experience.

In these architectures, we face specific challenges framed around questions like how we communicate between micro-frontends, how we route the user from one view to another, and (most importantly) how we identify the size of a micro-frontend.

In this chapter, we will cover the key decisions in starting a project with micro-frontend architecture. We’ll then discuss some of the companies that are using micro-frontends in production and their approaches.

Micro-Frontend Decision Framework

There are different approaches for architecting a micro-frontend application. To choose the best approach for our project, we first need to understand the context in which we’ll be operating. 

Some architectural decisions must be made upfront because they will guide future decisions—such as how to define a micro-frontend, orchestrate the different views, and compose the final view for the user, as well as how micro-frontends will communicate and share data.

These types of decisions exist within the micro-frontend decision framework, which is composed of four key areas: ...