Overcoming the Implementation Challenges of Micro-Frontends

A comprehensive guide of the micro-frontend architecture and implementation challenges.

Prompted and edited by the author.

Micro-frontends represent a paradigm shift in how we think about building web applications, offering a path to truly decoupled, domain-aligned UI components. Despite their potential for enhancing scalability and flexibility, implementing micro-frontends comes with its set of challenges. In this article, I will present the key concepts, why they are relevant, and how they can be dealt with to have a successful micro-frontend architecture.

Before discussing how micro-frontends work and the patterns we can apply, it’s important to first talk about two things: Domain-Driven Design and microservices. We’ll only briefly introduce the former, as it’s necessary to understand where this methodology fits. The latter, microservices, will be explored to comprehend the needs of a ‘micro’ architecture, and since these needs are already addressed in microservices, it will help us better understand what we need to do at the micro-frontend level.

Domain-Driven Design

The Domain-Driven Design (DDD) is a software construction methodology that is divided into two fundamental parts: strategy and tactics. Tactics are what everyone thinks about: the code patterns that make micro architecture implementations possible, but strategy is fundamental.

The basic strategy of DDD is to understand how the company’s structure works and to leverage the existing boundaries within it to structure the software. Instead of having a single software crossing several of these barriers, have many contained within each one so that it is independent. This means the company’s structure is reflected down to the code level, and hence the methodology is called Domain-Driven Design: the code’s design is based on the business domain.

Thus, this methodology divides the software into multiple smaller softwares, which we will call ‘micros’, and these ‘micros’ need to communicate with each other just as the company communicates within itself: very strongly within the same domain, very loosely between different domains.

We could think that in this methodology, the word…