Building Micro-Frontends

Foreword

Named architecture styles (such as microservices) are like art periods in history—no one plans for them, no single person is responsible for the ideas, yet they suffuse through a community. For example, no group of artists gathered in France in the late 19th century and decided to create impressionism. Rather, forces in the art world (reacting to the introduction of primitive photography) drove artists toward representation rather than capturing reality.

The same is true for styles of architecture—regardless of what some developers may suspect, there is no ivory tower to which architects retreat to concoct the New Big Thing. Instead, clever architects notice new capabilities appearing within the ecosystem, and they identify ways to combine these emerging capabilities to solve old problems. For microservices, the advent of DevOps, programmatic control of machine configuration (which led to containerization), and the need for faster turnaround spawned this architecture style at several influential organizations.

In the past, the name of the architecture style would lag for several years as people figured out that a trend was underway and identified the distinguishing characteristics that would lead to a name. However, that story slightly differs for microservices. Architects have become clever about noticing the development of new trends and keep a keen eye out for them. In March 2014, Martin Fowler and James Lewis published an iconic essay on Fowler’s website describing ...