Micro frontends are an architectural choice that have enabled enterprises to modularize their approach to the frontend. With micro frontends sitting on top of backend microservices, larger organizations are able to move with greater agility by empowering independent teams with end-to-end control over their piece of functionality within the larger application. 

And while micro frontends are still a newer idea, this type of application architecture is quickly becoming a key choice for a number of enterprises. If you haven’t done so already, now may be the time to begin building with micro frontends. 

Here are 3 reasons why your enterprise should strongly consider adopting a micro frontend architecture in 2021 and beyond. 

1. A growing number of developers and analysts are advocating for them.

Micro frontends are being used with increasing regularity. And, by and large, their efficacy has been proved out. 

As of April 2019, ThoughtWorks had placed micro frontends in the “adopt” category on their technology radar. They reaffirmed their assessment in May 2020. What this means is that they have seen success in adopting micro frontends in a number of projects, such that they feel confident that this architectural choice has reached the level of market maturity required for large enterprises to consider adopting it. 

What’s more is that as of 2020, 24 percent of developers have used micro frontends (Source: 2020 State of Microservices Report). Micro frontends are being used by organizations like IKEA, HelloFresh, Spotify, Soundcloud, and Zalando. 

So while it isn’t the case that most organizations have adopted micro frontends, a fair number of them have used them to great success. This makes them a leading edge technology that are at the same time a proven choice--which means now is a great time to start using them. In fact, jumping on the bandwagon now may be what gives you a competitive advantage in 2021. 

2. You can transition legacy apps into a micro frontend architecture or build net new apps using micro frontends.

One of the great things about micro frontends is that they aren’t necessarily an all or nothing proposition. So you can take your current architecture with its frontend monolith and transition it to micro frontends over time. You can do this by adding new features as micro frontends that are decoupled from the base app, or you can take pre-existing functionality and rebuild it as a micro frontend. This will give your teams increasing freedom to update iteratively and deploy independently over the course of time.

On the other hand, if you’re building a net new app, it’s the perfect opportunity to avoid a frontend monolith from the start.

3. The benefits of micro frontends to the enterprise are compelling.

Micro frontends offer a number of key benefits, saving your organization important resources and accelerating your time to market. In particular, if your enterprise is developing apps on Kubernetes, you can scale your application much more efficiently and precisely by developing in micro frontends. Instead of scaling an entire application up, micro frontends enable you to scale up only the part of the site or app that experiences the peak traffic that necessitates a scale up, saving important infrastructural resources and applying them exactly where they’re needed.  

Furthermore, since your teams can work independently on their given piece of functionality within the app and set their own sprints, micro frontends are key in increasing the overall agility of your organization. Micro frontends remove the organizational barriers that keep your teams from getting an update pushed to production, allowing them to innovate at the pace of their ideas and their ability to implement those ideas. 

Build apps using micro frontends on Kubernetes with Entando.

When release cycles take months instead of weeks, your business is left unable to deliver modern online experiences. Development and deployment bottlenecks slow your ability to make application updates, keeping you from iterating and innovating. And outdated or clunky UX keeps you from winning customers over and retaining them.

So that’s why we created a platform to help you get your ideas to market faster.

Entando is the leading micro frontend platform for building enterprise web apps on Kubernetes. We want to change the way enterprises think about building their apps, sites, and portals in order to innovate more quickly.

With Entando, you can:

• Leverage customized blueprints using the Entando Component Generator (built on JHipster) to quickly create micro frontends and assemble them into an app.
• Reuse UI/UX components across multiple projects via the Entando Component Repository, saving money and increasing development speed. 
• Scale apps quickly and effectively with Entando’s custom Kubernetes operator, automating the deployment of high availability, self-healing applications. 
• Centrally manage user roles with Entando Identity Management (built on Keycloak).

Entando is open source with available enterprise support and services. Begin developing on the platform today, and get a quote to see how our team can help your enterprise build better apps, sites, and portals--faster.