The Power of Micro Frontends & Breaking Down Monoliths | Thayse Onofrio

**Thayse Onofrio** (0:00)
If the developers are not comfortable with the technical side of it, they don't know much about it, they might have some concerns initially. So I would say that's more like a challenge, just making everyone feel comfortable with that as they go along.
But outside of that, I think folks are generally happy about just having this independence and ownership.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:20)
So you heard it here, do micro-frontends, your developers will be happy.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:25)
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**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (0:56)
Hey everyone, welcome back to Dev Interrupted. I'm Ben Lloyd Pearson. I'm the director of Deloitte Relations at Linear B.
I'm pleased to be joined by Thayse Onofrio, the lead software engineer at Thoughtworks. Thayse, thanks for being here.

**Thayse Onofrio** (1:10)
Thank you. Thank you for having me. Very happy to be here.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (1:13)
Yeah, wonderful. We were talking, we had a long trip from Brazil, so glad you made it here.
So we're going to talk a little bit about the session that you have here at this event, but I'm sure we'll touch on other subjects too. But the main thing is that as apps expand, so does the number of teams that are needed to manage the various functionalities. And without the right infrastructure, this growth can lead to a host of issues from communication challenges and code conflicts to busy pipelines, tangled release interdependencies. It can be a pretty complex picture. And your talk is all about the solution you've come up with, which is micro frontends.
And this architectural approach has allowed individual application components to be operated and deployed independently to sort of get out of that like monolithic maze that a lot of companies are facing. So I want to talk about what the future of frontend development looks like within this context. But before we get into that, let's just get into the basics. So what is a micro frontend?

**Thayse Onofrio** (2:16)
Great question. So when we talk about micro frontends, and yes, very much related to microservices, what is more popular.
But the same way micro frontends, we have like smaller frontend applications, but we can develop and deploy them independently from each other, each having their own responsibilities, but then they all look the same for the user. So as a user looking at this application, like if it's a web application, it doesn't really matter to me how it's done, how everything was created, but when we look into how it's being done, developed and deployed, everything is separate and we just compose them together. So for a user, it shouldn't really matter, but for the teams working on it, it makes a lot of difference if it's not like a whole monolith and we can work on our own thing without having so many conflicts and blocking each other all the time.

**Ben Lloyd Pearson** (3:09)
So let's talk about some of the unique challenges that you've encountered while doing this, because I like the comparison to microservices. That concept has been around for a little while, so people are pretty familiar with it.
What are the unique challenges that you've faced while you've been implementing this micro front-end practice, specifically related to the monolithic architecture?

**Thayse Onofrio** (3:31)
Yeah, I think with monolith architecture, especially when the teams start growing too much, we can get a lot of conflicts. And if you have different teams working on the same code base, but maybe even different products, it can be very confusing for everyone working on it. There needs to be a lot of communication within everyone. And that doesn't happen if you have separate teams. Even in the same team, sometimes there is not enough communication happening.
So we start to face a lot of issues. If we are using the same pipelines, like the pipelines are always busy, there is no enough resource to handle it. So it starts to get really challenging. And I think one of the most pain points is deployment, because you have to, one team depends on the other team to do a deployment. So you don't have that flexibility about just being able to deploy whatever you want.
It can really slow the team down, having to depend one team on the other. So I think that's where, in a lot of times, going towards this micro front end approach really helps. And then we can, and there are a lot of different techniques we can use to get to this approach.