Learn to build scalable micro-frontend applications using React, discussing their advantages over monolithic frontend applications.

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Building and managing large-scale projects can be challenging, and the micro-frontend architecture is gaining popularity for handling these challenges. It extends the concept of microservices to the frontend, allowing multiple teams to work independently on different modules. React is highlighted as a strong tech stack for implementing micro-frontends due to its extensive ecosystem and community support. The post includes a practical guide on creating a micro-frontend application using React and the create-mf-app package, as well as best practices and solutions to common issues in micro-frontend development.

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And they forgot to mention the elephant in the room.
Actually two elephants.
First: No step to test the composed solution. And that is where things tend to break.
Second: Dependency management. You probably don’t want to have the react library imported x times for each of your micro frontends. So when you bundle, you import common libraries only. And now all your x micro frontends are tightly coupled as any version update of the library in one micro frontend leads to version update in others.

Individual parts can run well independently within a micro-frontend environment, but when they interact, that is where bugs appear. It is very much an important but, quite often overlooked necessity. Leaving out this critical component can really leave integration bugs as a sink for massive amounts of time especially as new features or micro-frontends are implemented.
The dependency duplication is a real issue. Loading multiple versions of React (or any common library) across micro-frontends is wasteful, and subtle bugs arise due to version mismatches. Solutions like Module Federation in Webpack can help shared dependencies across micro-frontends, but careful version control and testing are required to prevent unintended coupling. One technique is keeping common dependencies together such that every micro-frontend is held to the consistency, thus somehow defeating that purpose for being independent at each one.
Thinking through architecture carefully along with some rigorous testing is necessary and important in implementing a successful micro-frontend-based application, even though there are factors like this against micro-frontends that support scalability in an application but facilitate having teams that work independently to develop features.

The <code>create-mf-app</code> package seems like a great way to make a micro-frontend application from scratch. But do they also have a way to convert an existing monolith to a micro-frontend? Or wire up an existing monolith to an orchestrator?

Microfrontends make almost no sense with React. The framework cannot be dynamically populated, and you tie a dependency to the entire platform just to briefly integrate a ‘Microfrontend.’ Only CustomComponents are true Microfrontends.