Breaking Boundaries in Frontend Development with Micro-Frontend

Are you tired of slow deployment? Cycles tightly coupled dependencies, many external dependencies, but moreover, the constant struggle to handle a monolithic frontend code base — these are the issues that many teams face. Do you think that there is a better solution to solve this problem today? I want to introduce a Micro frontend.

This is an approach that could solve these persistent challenges. Imagine a world where your dependencies are loosely coupled, a word where deployment is swift and you have a fast feedback loop as a developer, your code base is completely manageable, and your cognitive load is really low. Micro frontend tenets allow you to break down your monolithic code base into smaller and manageable pieces that compose your system. Each piece can be developed, tested, and deployed independently, giving you the agility that your business requires in order to scale and introduce new features. In this article, we will discuss modernizing your frontend application using a micro-frontend architecture.

Micro-Frontend

Micro-frontends are the technical representation of a business sub-domain, which allow independent implementation either with the same or different technology. They enable you to break your frontend app into smaller, independent parts, making it more robust and efficient. Unlike monolith frontends, they minimize the code shared with other subdomains, and they are owned by a single team. There are various micro-frontend composition patterns, including build-time composition, which consists of all the micro-frontend being compiled into a single deployable artifact like an NPM package into an application shell, which can be an entirely self-contained micro-frontend in itself. It is used by smaller teams that don’t require a high degree of flexibility.

We have server-side composition in which the user navigates to the page in the application. It composes micro-frontend page fragments at the server side and returns them to the browser. Each page fragment server is independently deployed, and it’s ideal for search engine optimization purposes. Runtime composition involves using JavaScript to dynamically load and assemble a micro frontend in the user’s browser from independently deployed URIs. This is done through web components, frames, or even Webpack Module Federation. This approach is the most flexible, which enables the team to isolate releases and deploy micro-frontends independently.

Let’s see an example of an e-commerce micro-frontend application where each backend service app, for example, payment, account, and search, has their independent frontends hosted by the parent frontend app, leading to a more robust and decoupled architecture. This approach promotes team autonomy in DevOps pipelines, provides flexibility for teams to choose their own tech stack, and offers better performance through shared common dependency across multiple micro-frontends. which result in smaller bundle sizes to load on browsers. This decoupling facilitates easier maintenance and faster development, resulting in a quicker time to market for your new features.

In this e-commerce website micro-frontend use case, we will be leveraging the runtime composition pattern previously mentioned.

Let’s start with a user who will be accessing your e-commerce web application hosted on AWS. The web app connects to Amazon Cognito for user authentication and authorization to help control access to your web application. Now let’s see how your application core team set up the parent container micro-frontend, which will be responsible to render child micro-frontends for various services. The web app is being served through Amazon CloudFront, providing high-speed static and dynamic content delivery backed by Amazon S3 storage. The web app is hosted using Amazon Amplify, which is a complete solution to configure, build, and host web apps by your choice of technology stack, which in this case we are using React Library for the frontend development. And Amazon AppSync to provide a single endpoint to query and update the user database, which is backed by a NoSQL Amazon DynamoDB database.

Next, the search app child micro-frontend provides a search engine to analyze product data coming from various sources. Much like the parent container, you can similarly leverage Amplify and AppSync APIs, but rather than DynamoDB, you can connect to Amazon OpenSearch for real-time product search capabilities.
And also use Angular JS for your frontend development without relying on the core micro-frontend tech stack. With this structure, both parent and child applications are hosted independently and governed autonomously by different teams, providing more flexibility for your DevOps pipeline.

An important aspect of this design is that each site or micro-frontend is hosted on its own subdomain and is accessed via routing from the container application.

Now, let’s dive into your payment micro-frontend, which is similar to the others, except this child micro-frontend leverages the Vue.js framework for UI and an Amazon Aurora RDS instance, as they may require a transactional database for payment services. This gives you the flexibility to choose your tech stack based on business-critical functionality requirements.

Finally, each of the child micro-frontends provides their package JavaScript bundle to the parent container core application in runtime, and the landing page is rendered by loading parent app bundle JS and index.html files.

This architecture is scalable and enables multiple teams to deploy their micro-frontend based on their own requirements. You can also leverage AWS Amplify to configure a quick end-to-end lifecycle of development and deployment for a feature-rich full-stack micro-frontend application. This development and deployment cycle leveraging AWS Amplify consists of four stages.
First, you can configure your application frontend as well as backend with a selection of key components like authentication, storage, databases, and APIs based on your flexibility.
Second, you can build your features in the language of your choice by using Amplify libraries or Amplify Studio and connect your frontend application to new or existing AWS backend services.
Third, you can easily deploy your web app or website through the fast, secure, and reliable AWS Content Delivery Network.
Lastly, you can customize and integrate with other AWS services to scale your application to support evolving business requirements.

In this, we have explored the benefit of the micro-frontend, its composition patterns, and how you can leverage AWS services to build micro-frontends for your use case easily at scale.

About the Author:

Deepa E is a passionate Fullstack Developer working with Vue.js and Node.js. She is eager to learn and explore new technologies while building her skills in software development.

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