Micro frontends do for the frontend what microservices do for the backend. They are changing the way organizations structure their teams to deliver modern user experiences.

By breaking up monolithic structures into smaller frontend components that can then be assembled back together onto a single page, enterprises can maintain a streamlined development process even as their organization grows.

That’s because micro frontends allow you to empower smaller teams to develop and deliver particular functionalities independently from the rest of the application. This decreases cross-team dependency, thereby also decreasing the organizational drag on the innovation that any one team is able to achieve.

Furthermore, micro frontends are of particular benefit to larger organizations who have multiple teams and complex frontend needs. A monolithic frontend can begin to slow forward progress, so micro frontends enable businesses to eliminate bottlenecks and democratize the UX development process.

Far more than a new buzzword, micro frontends are an important tool that are enabling large businesses to provide customer experiences that continue to propel their brands forward. Smart business leaders are leveraging the benefits of micro frontends to maintain their competitive edge.

Here are 7 organizations that are successfully utilizing micro frontends.

1. IKEA

The European furniture company (that’s almost equally famous for serving Swedish meatballs in its food court) employs micro frontends for their online store experience.

As Jan Stenberg notes, “Kotte, IT consultant at Jayway and currently working as a web architect for IKEA, prefers splitting a system vertically to create self-contained systems with both backend and frontend built by the same team.”

A key to success with micro frontends at IKEA is keeping the teams small. “[Kotte] believes that teams up to around 10-12 people works well, above that the team gets less effective.” This is what Jeff Bezos refers to as the “two pizza rule.” According to Bezos, if a team is too large to feed with two pizzas, the team is simply too large.

2. DAZN

DAZN is a sports streaming service that was founded in Europe but has expanded to nine countries worldwide. Luca Mezzalira, who is the Chief Architect at DAZN, has been a major advocate of micro frontends, and he has produced a number of resources explaining both why micro frontends are beneficial and how organizations can implement them.

Micro frontends have enabled DAZN to empower smaller teams that can work independently.

As Mezzalira states, “Micro-frontends can really help an organization to move faster, innovate inside a business domain and isolate the failures…Often centralisation causes team frustrations because external dependencies are difficult to be resolved considering a team cannot affect too much the work of another one.”

Micro frontends serve to create the kind of decentralization that larger organizations must employ in order to maintain speed to market.

3. Upwork

The freelancing platform for independent business professionals to connect and collaborate made the move to a micro frontend architecture in 2017, as part of an overall effort to modernize their user experience.

Sep Nasiri says, “Migrating to a micro frontend architecture presented some challenges but the benefits of modernizing Upwork’s frontend along the way made it worthwhile. Modernization will help future-proof our site and streamline certain services to deliver a better, more consistent user experience for Upwork’s 17 million global registered users.”

4. Spotify

Spotify, the online streaming media service, uses micro frontends for their desktop applications and utilizes iframes to assemble the application together.

5. SoundCloud

SoundCloud, the European online audio distribution platform and music sharing website, has also seen their teams benefit from using micro frontends.

Bora Tunca is a software developer there, and he says, “At SoundCloud we have one team and one product manager responsible for each feature or set of similar features. We hold this team accountable for delivering a consistent experience across all platforms.”

6. HelloFresh

HelloFresh is an international meal-kit company based in Berlin, Germany and serves as the largest meal-kit provider in the United States. And their development teams have been able to overcome barriers to innovation by breaking up the frontend monolith.

Pepijn Senders, an engineer on the HelloFresh team, has said, “While previously we had this huge monolithic application that was unmaintainable and nigh-on unbootable in a local environment...now each project has its own server, and its isolated dev environment. All the external dependencies can be configured, so you can talk to the live, staging, or your own environment to debug problems.”

Micro frontends enable teams of developers to work with smaller codebases that are more manageable and comprehensible. This keeps them from slowing down due to undue complexity or mistakes that may result from having to work within that complexity.

7. Zalando

Zalando is an ecommerce company based in Germany. However, they do more than simply sell products online. In addition to ecommerce, the company also heads Project Mosaic, which is a set of services and libraries that support a micro frontend style architecture for large websites, making a significant contribution to this method of frontend development.

Build modern web apps using micro frontends on Entando.

When release cycles take months instead of weeks, your business is left unable to deliver modern online experiences. Development 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 to quickly create micro frontends and assemble them onto a single page. Then reuse UI/UX components across multiple projects via the Entando Component Repository, saving money and increasing development speed. Scale quickly and effectively with Entando’s custom Kubernetes operator, automating the deployment of scalable, self-healing applications.

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