Filling The Gaps in Microservice Frontend Communication: Case for New Frontend Patterns

Microservices architecture has exploded in popularity; many organizations use this architectural style to avoid the limitations of large and monolithic backends. Most systems require multiple frontend clients, such that each frontend client expects tailored responses from a backend service. However, there are no best practices for their integration and communication with microservice backends. Backend for Frontends (BFF) is one of the most used patterns for gluing the frontend with the microservices layer. It keeps the frontend layer decoupled from the microservices complications; nevertheless, it is tightly coupled with the frontend layer. Therefore, it introduces barriers in the development process, besides adding risks for business inconsistency. In addition, it negatively impacts the consumed overall data size and time over requests. This risk is boosted by the evolution of the micro-frontend architectural style that encourages the decomposition approach for the frontend components. This paper proposes an alternative pattern that addresses current gaps introduced by the BFF patterns. It supports cloud-native system components to provide the required customization to frontends, along with increasing the frontend awareness to share more responsibilities in the architecture. The new pattern facilitates customizability for client types when interacting with the microservices business layer.