As the use of micro frontends becomes an emerging trend in enterprise software development, your organization may be considering a move away from your current frontend development methods toward a micro frontend architecture. Your business needs may have reached a size and complexity that’s beginning to cause tension or bottlenecks in your frontend development, which makes micro frontends an attractive solution--particularly as you look to continue scaling your business.

However, micro frontends are not a silver bullet, and they aren’t necessary for every project. Moving to a micro frontend architecture will introduce a layer of complexity to your code and your teams that won’t be right for certain organizations or projects, and you don’t necessarily want to build a tank to mow your lawn. 

So moving to a micro frontend architecture is far more than simply a technology decision. In order to successfully leverage micro frontends and the benefits they offer, you'll need to make important business decisions for your organization. 

To help you with your consideration, here are 4 signs that it’s time for your business to transition from a frontend monolith to a micro frontend architecture.

1. You need to deliver on the business goals of many different stakeholders.

As your business continues to scale, you may find that you’re attempting to deliver on the business goals of any number of stakeholders, both internally and externally. For example, your different lines of business may have different owners and teams that are working toward their own goals and on their own timetables. On top of that, you may have partners with additional interests and needs.

Managing all of these important goals and needs can become unwieldy when you’re developing frontend applications with a monolithic architecture. Micro frontends enable you to decouple functionality and reorganize yourself around your various business functions and goals. This enables your teams to give focused attention to each stakeholder’s needs, both within your organization and outside it.

2. You need to innovate new features or functionality more quickly.

You may have incredibly innovative ideas about how to reach new customers or how to reach your current customers in a new space. But many organizations are limited by their ability to build online solutions in a timely manner. And your ideas are only as good as your ability to get to market quickly. So your inability to implement innovation can be a challenge, particularly when a single frontend team is driving toward multiple goals while managing a monolithic frontend architecture.

Your business needs may be evolving quickly as you seek to respond to customer feedback in real time. With micro frontends, you have the ability to spin up a new team to build a new feature or functionality without negatively affecting (or being weighed down by) the other parts of your business.

Furthermore, even if you currently have a frontend monolithic structure, you can begin to transition away from it by creating new functionalities as micro frontends that are decoupled from that monolith. (We talk more about that here.)

3. You’re migrating to more modern architectures and tools.

It may be good to consider transitioning to a micro frontend architecture when you're already modernizing other aspects of your development processes, such as moving to Kubernetes.

When you change that infrastructure, that’s an opportunity to reorganize your business around something like micro frontends. It may make sense to make multiple changes in your architecture at once, rather than modernizing more incrementally.

What’s more is that micro frontends and Kubernetes go hand-in-hand to allow you to build vertical teams that have end-to-end control over a particular functionality within your application.

4. You’re looking to improve reusability and resiliency.

A key benefit of micro frontends is that they help increase reusability across projects. So if your organization is looking to decrease development time for new applications while also standardizing UX and the development process, a microservice and micro frontend architecture can help you accomplish those goals.

Furthermore, as you seek to move toward a more automated deployment architecture, micro frontends help you to do that without breaking other parts of your site or application by moving you toward a more modular architecture, which improves resiliency.

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 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.