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The benefits of Micro Frontends for enterprise development

A deep dive into the business benefits and development opportunities created when enterprise organizations embrace micro frontend development.

The Benefits of Enterprise Development

It’s been a little more than a decade since microservices were introduced as a modular, flexible alternative to the bulky monoliths used to support enterprise software architecture. Today, at least 81 percent of businesses now use microservices within their organization.

Microservices or a microservice architecture breaks down the backend of applications into independent functions. This enables various development teams to build the app simultaneously, update the app functions without disrupting the other app functions, and ultimately scale production by having multiple teams build, test, and ship separate services in parallel.

Micro Frontends Layout Image
Micro Frontends Layout image

The proliferation of microservices is bringing this concept to the frontend experience in the form of micro frontends. When implemented through the right development platform, micro frontend architecture can reduce the time and resource cost of web and mobile app development for your organization—all while supporting a more flexible and engaging user experience. In this guide, we’ll offer a deep dive into the business benefits and development opportunities created when enterprise organizations embrace micro frontend development.

You’ll also get a first-hand look at how Ionic Portals can turn the promise of micro frontends into reality for your enterprise native mobile applications.

Micro Frontends, Defined

Excited about the potential value of micro frontends, but confused about what they actually are? Don’t worry—we’re here to help.

Micro frontends take the monolithic application architecture delivering your entire frontend experience from a single codebase, and divide that monolith into many different features. These features can then be built, updated, and deployed in parallel—and reused across multiple applications. For example, a chat interface might be built and deployed as a micro frontend that lives in a dozen or more separate applications.

This chat interface would be built and maintained by a single team whose single focus is on the chat experience. When you build a new application that needs a chat feature, you simply incorporate this micro frontend experience—no need to build an entirely new chat solution for that individual app.

Block diagram of 3 apps with communication interface for data sync.

This approach to frontend development offers a number of benefits, including:

• Faster development of new applications, by reusing existing functionality.

• Easier scaling of large projects by allowing multiple teams to work in parallel.

• Improved UX by having each team focus on doing one thing well.

The current micro frontend model borrows concepts from past innovations on the enterprise frontend—including SelfContained Systems and Frontend Integration for Verticalized Systems—and brings together these approaches while unifying frontend and backend applications through a mediated API layer.

Historically, micro frontend architectures have been very popular with modern web applications, where it’s relatively straightforward and easy to enable this kind of approach.

However, doing this in a native mobile app is not so easy.

Key Characteristics of a Micro Frontend
The Business Benefits of Using Micro Frontends for Mobile
Building Apps With Micro Frontends: A Cost-Benefit Analysis
Who Benefits from Adopting Micro Frontends?
Examples of Enterprise Apps Built With Micro Frontends
Introducing Ionic Portals
Build Native Applications That Do More With Less
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