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Katya Pavlopoulos
Katya Pavlopoulos

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Microfrontend Architecture: What You Need to Know Before You Start

As web applications continue to evolve, frontend developers face new challenges in maintaining large and complex codebases. The rise of microfrontends has emerged as a solution to address these challenges, offering a scalable and flexible architecture pattern.

If you're about to migrate your monolithic app to use the microfrontend architecture, or you're developing a new project from scratch using this architecture pattern, here are some things you need to do at the start to make the process ✨easy-breezy✨ (or at least easier).

Lock in all inflexible requirements

There are many different ways to implement microfrontends. The best method for your use case depends ENTIRELY on your hard requirements. You may not be able to have all the requirements locked in before you start, but to spare yourself from having to re-architecture your microfrontends system you need to at least know all your inflexible requirements upfront.

Push for separation of concerns

Always be mindful if what you're implementing in one microfrontend depends in some way on what's in another microfrontend. If you make a change in microfrontend a, will you have to also make a change in microfrontend b? Look for ways to improve separation of concerns. Note that depending on your requirements, a true separation of concerns may not be possible, but you should still try to push for maximum decoupling of microfrontends.

Ignore frontend framework at the top architecture level

To save yourself and your company many headaches down the line, keep the communication between the microfrontends minimal and framework-agnostic. If the microfrontend is built with React, the other microfrontends should be able to communicate with it even if you (or more likely, another team at a different point in time) reimplement it with Vue or Angular or something else.

Plan to spend some a lot of time debugging in prod (especially if it's your first time implementing microfrontends)

Even though all your microfrontends may be working together properly on your local machine, you may most certainly will run into really strange issues in production. Just be mentally prepared for that, and budget in some time for your debugging party. A good place to start debugging is by looking at your config files (or, if the issues are around styling, start by investigating how your css is packaged for production).

If you're about to embark on your first microfrontend architecture adventure, can I recommend a course? This is not an affiliate link (in fact, you can just look up this course by its title on udemy), but Microfrontends with React: A Complete Developer's Guide was a life saver for me.

Have fun, and good luck!

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