Building Micro-Frontends

Chapter 2. Micro-Frontend Principles

At the beginning of my career, I remember working on many software projects where small or medium-size teams were developing a monolithic application with all the functionalities of a platform available in a single artifact, and the product produced during the development of a software and deployed to a web server.

When we have a monolith, we write a lot of code that should harmoniously work together. In my experience, we tend to preoptimize or even over-engineer our application logic. Abstracting reusable parts of our code can create a more complex codebase, and sometimes the effort of maintaining a complex logic doesn’t pay off in the long run. Unfortunately, something that looked straightforward at the time could look very unwieldy a few months later.

In the past decade, public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud started to gain traction. Nowadays they are popular for delegating what is increasingly becoming a commodity, freeing up organizations to focus on what really matters in a business: the services offered to the final users.

Although cloud systems allowed us to scale our projects in an easier way than before, monoliths, unfortunately, require us to scale not just a single part of our system but the entire system, causing many headaches if our system is not modularized or written with high standards.

Furthermore, working on a monolith codebase with distributed teams and colocated ones could be challenging, ...