In order for an application to meet the multiple needs of an enterprise, it often needs to be very large and complicated. But the larger the codebase gets, the more difficult an application can be to maintain and update. For many, a microservice architecture has aided in breaking up backend code into more manageable components. However, the frontend often remains unwieldy.  

This is why many IT leaders have turned to a micro frontend architecture to help them break up the frontend monolith and move with greater agility. Ultimately, it’s helping them rise to customer needs more quickly and effectively. 

Nevertheless, micro frontends aren’t a silver bullet. And since they introduce a new level of complexity to your applications, IT leaders need to be aware of the best practices that will help them capitalize on the benefits that micro frontends offer. 

Here are key 3 ways to get the most out of micro frontends.

1. Align teams around business function.

When it comes to defining how you will break up your application into micro frontends, there are a couple different ways you can go about it. 

In a horizontal split, multiple teams will work on different components within the same view or page. This means that each team will need to work together to ensure that the different micro frontends will compose into a seamless experience in the view. In a vertical split, a single team is responsible for the entire view or page. Then the different views are composed into a single application. 

While every situation is unique, we would generally recommend enterprises splitting micro frontends vertically around a specific business function. For example, if you are building a banking site, you can have different micro frontends created around checking, savings, and credit cards. You can divide your micro frontends according to departments, or subgroups within those departments, and allow them to focus on an individual business goal. 

The benefit of this strategy is that each business unit has the freedom and agency to address challenges, determine solutions, test them, and deploy them without negatively affecting other parts of the application code and without needing to be dependent on other teams. 

When you give cross-functional teams the ability to innovate at the pace of their ideas and their ability to implement them, what ends up happening is that your entire organization is able to innovate more quickly. 

2. Develop a culture of automation and isolate failures.

In order to accommodate for the complexity of a micro frontend architecture, your organization will need to build automation and testing into every phase of the development, deployment, and release cycles. This means implementing a pipeline for continuous integration and delivery. 

You will also want to focus on isolating failures, which can be more difficult in a micro frontend architecture. When failures occur, you may consider displaying alternate content or hiding that part of the application in order to improve user experience. 

3. Have a strong design language system.

When cross-functional teams have the ability to build, design, and deploy UX independently from one another, an application can begin to look mismatched unless there is a strong design language system in place. 

Your application, while composed of independently developed micro frontends, should still deliver a singular experience for the user. A casual user shouldn’t be able to tell where your organization has divided into micro frontends. They should simply see one complete application--and one with a great user experience at that.

Begin developing apps with 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 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 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.