It can be difficult to turn a large ship quickly, and this tension is something that many enterprises face as they seek to pivot toward more modern ways of developing applications.

When switching from a frontend monolithic architecture to micro frontends, you must make  a choice. You can choose to move to a micro frontend architecture via a big bang migration, or opt to take a more phased approach. And while there are many benefits to “ripping off the bandaid,” a big bang also comes with a certain measure of risk as well. 

So most organizations agree that phasing out a major transition is preferable. According to Ave Point, 61 percent of organizations agree that “avoiding a big bang migration” is an important priority.

The good news is that it’s quite possible to transition away from a frontend monolith to micro frontends in a slow and deliberate way. Here are a couple of ways you can do that, as well as how these strategies will benefit your organization.

Transition to a micro frontend architecture over time.

Instead of moving to a micro frontend architecture all at once, it may be more advantageous to begin strategically decoupling specific functionalities from the monolith. You may want to start with the least critical and complicated functionality, slowly moving closer to the center.

If you’re moving to a micro frontend architecture, it’s likely that your organization is of a certain size and complexity. So moving too quickly may put too much pressure on your teams or may cause you to run into problems that create interruptions in service for your customers. So focusing on transitioning individual aspects of your site may be a much better route to go.

Before you begin making the transition, it’ll be important to lay out a roadmap for your organization. Decide what functionality should remain as part of the base app, and what ought to be decoupled as micro frontends. It’s likely not worth it to completely decouple everything, so spend some time strategizing about how exactly you want your eventual micro frontend architecture to look.

Spin up new teams for new features.

In addition to decoupling existing features or functionality from the base app, you can also begin to build out your micro frontend architecture by spinning up new teams to develop new features and functionality that’ll be developed as micro frontends that are decoupled from the monolith from the start.

As you seek to continue modernizing your user experience, make sure that your development process is in line with your eventual goals to decrease the size and prominence of your frontend monolith. In so doing, you’ll be able to attract top talent to work with the tools that they most enjoy using and that will help advance their careers by keeping themselves current.

With micro frontends, you can instill a culture of iterative updating and continuous experimentation.

As you migrate to a micro frontend architecture, you’re serving to future proof your development processes and decrease your level of technical debt. And while the process of paying technical debt that you have incurred in the past may be difficult, the result will be a greater ability to innovate and update more quickly in the future.

And that’s because micro frontends can be updated independently, that means that your teams can think strategically about updating them more iteratively, with a focus on continuous experimentation.

By empowering independent teams to focus on a given feature, function, or line of business inside of your organization and enabling them to determine their own sprints to release, you can build into a culture that keeps you on the leading edge of UX and development best practices and incur less technical debt in the future.

Build better apps faster 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.