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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

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Are micro frontends still a thing?

This idea was all the rage for a while: The idea is no longer trending like it once was, but is that because it has settled in as a common pattern or has the idea faded?

Top comments (11)

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zwacky profile image
Simon Wicki

I strongly believe that you shouldn't just use micro frontends, because they're the latest thing.

they solve a problem. if you don't have that problem, don't make your stack more complicated with an additional abstraction.

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conantonakos profile image
Constantine Antonakos

100% this. Thanks for expressing it.

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evanmeidell profile image
Evan Meidell • Edited

So, maybe I live in a bubble but a lot of companies near me(Utah) use SingleSpa. Canopy Tax, Inside Sales, PluralSight to name a few. I wound't say dead but its 'stabilized' into a smaller popularity group. Still a really cool tech and will likely live for a long time yet.

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Colum Ferry

They're pretty hype again because of Webpack 5's introduction of the Module Federation package

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mikaoelitiana profile image
Mika Andrianarijaona

From my experience, I see that the implementation is still quite complex in particular for existing large project. A few months ago we started to look at ways to improve our project architecture and support micro-frontends but the task is huge and it’s priority tended to decrease over time.
On the other hand, for new projects, it seems to be over-engineering so it was neither the right time to implement it.

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Asad Ullah

Micro front ends make sense when either we are modernizing an existing big system module wise. Or there are large distributed teams working on a big system.

Apart from these two, there is no problem which micro front ends solve.

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Fabian Holzer

I'm working on that topic within my current employer since longer than Thoughtworks put the term on its tech radar. From my experience, the publicly available example implementation and all the conference talks don't really cut it. If a system is large enough that its need for orgnaizational independence warrants the architetural style, then you'll very likely implement it from scratch. One good thing is that body of available information has grown tremendously and a common terminology has emerged.

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Joe Mainwaring

When we started our product in 2019, our Architect at the time laid down a foundation that was meant to support micro frontends, but AFAIK in practice, the engineering team just loads the full project when developing locally.

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Mark Roxberry

Not sure that anything has faded (your post referenced an article from only a few months ago). I'm seeing more reference works, published code and discussions and heads down work in progress (community is in a flow state, maybe). Has architecture adapted to MFEs realized?

I'm working with both Single-SPA and Webpack Module Federation and view an MFE architecture as a fit for products, systems that are developed by multiple teams (read Team Topologies), aligning with the "developer as a service" reality.

  • Platform services, control plane are developed, promoted by our core platform group.
  • Vertical splits for our business sub domains, with flexibility on the tech stack for those sub domains and developed by "stream aligned" teams.
  • Horizontal splits, case by case.

I like the flexibility in the team formation, not handcuffed to a static job req, technology stack. I think more work in the service / module discovery tooling needs to be done with more top down exemplars, for an opinionated platform architecture. I think we are not at a point that we agree on what are the best practices of an MFE architecture - more work needed.

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Alfredo Bello

if you used the things just for trending, the problem is not the thing

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leob profile image
leob

I guess it's a bit of a niche thing, only useful in a relatively small number of scenarios.