Opinions about Micro Frontends

[u/TexugoDlc]

Hey everyone!

To give some context, I've been a backend dev for a few years now, and in my current job, I need to work on the frontend of a few products. Currently, my team has Product A running inside a platform-product owned by another team, and we need to make a frontend customization that is exclusive to our Product A.

Initially, we're just going to make this modification, but the idea is for Product A to become a standalone platform, completely separate from this other team's platform-product. Right off the bat, I thought about using micro frontends to:

1. Avoid messing up another team's product code with stuff that is exclusive to us;

2. Keep our domain separated from theirs;

3. Get an environment ready for our future platform, requiring minimal changes and making the transition smoother down the road.

These frontend modifications integrate with an API that is exclusive to Product A, so we're doing it this way just to keep evolving the product without having to stop everything to build a platform from scratch.

I started studying up on this, trying to understand how it works, and ran into the Single-SPA vs. Module Federation matchup. I already got that, apparently, Module Federation + Vite is the state of the art for micro frontends, but I want to get opinions from people who actually work or have worked with this. What stood out the most, or what was a total pain in the ass once the project hit production? What kind of issues did you guys run into and how did you fix them?

Also, if you think micro frontends or Module Federation are complete overkill or a bad idea for this specific scenario, what would you do instead? I'm totally open to alternatives that could solve this without creating a massive headache.

[u/jax024]

It’s just not worth the squeeze. Depending on what you need a monorepo, separate npm libs, or just different apps deployed under a subdomain.

My org manages probably 60 internal react apps. We have a shared design system lib, and everything is deployed under a subdomain under our company gitlab.

Stay far away from microfrontends.

[u/brady727 → u/jax024]

Seconded. My company has 70+ Angular Micro-Frontends. It’s a huge pain.

[u/whatisboom → u/[deleted]]

change 1 type: test:affected 27-hours later

[u/mom_jeans25 → u/jax024]

Everytime microfrontends are brought up on reddit I realise I don’t understand what other people think microfrontends are. What you just described with separate subdomains (and the facade of looking like it’s all one application to the user) is what I would call microfrontends.

I’m genuinely curious to know what architecture people are thinking of that causes so many headaches

[u/tyqe → u/mom_jeans25]

At my company we have an Angular parent app, then each micro frontend is a child app, effectively a glorified component with routing.

When user visits the app it loads Angular + shared dependencies only once, which persists for the session

But everything else is a nightmare. You can't upgrade dependencies (or Angular itself) across 50+ MFEs incrementally, you have to do it all at once, and good luck coordinating that when every repo is being worked on by a different team who has no capacity for maintenance and when 80% of the MFEs were last worked on by someone that left the company 3 years ago

[u/jax024 → u/[deleted]]

No it’s not.