Micro frontends bring autonomy, helping automate design and development workflows for applications to deploy updates independently.
Monolithic frontends: Simple yet challenging
Frontend development has been a fundamental part of software frameworks for a long time and has evolved rapidly in recent years. Not too long ago, everything was a mix of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Then came jQuery, followed by full-fledged frameworks like Angular and React. Each step forward promised better performance, scalability, and maintainability. But every new approach introduced its own set of challenges. Many struggled scaling frontend applications, maintaining team consistency, and dealing with slow deployments.
Early web applications were built as monoliths, meaning the front and back end were tightly coupled. As they grew in complexity and scale, so did the problems. For example, making a minor UI update would have led to redeploying an entire application. Tweaking a single component would have taken hours of navigating thousands of lines of CSS code. Shifting from monolithic frontends to micro frontends backed by design systems and component libraries is the way forward for software teams and application modernization.
Breaking free from monolithic applications
Shortly after monoliths, Single Page Applications (SPAs) popularized building web apps with Angular, React, and Vue.js to make frontend development dynamic and interactive. Component-based architectures helped developers break down the UI into modularized, reusable blocks, making it easier to manage code. It felt like a win until a few cracks started to show:
And this is where micro frontends can prove to be a game-changer. Instead of a single, massive frontend codebase, applications are split into smaller, self-contained modules, each owned by a separate team. This way, teams have better autonomy to develop and deploy features. The crucial point to remember about independent frontend modules is consistency—design systems and component libraries will play a vital role here.
Design systems and component libraries
A design system defines typography, colors, spacing, and components’ behavior. But having a sound design system alone isn’t enough. Developers need an actual code implementation of these guidelines—and that’s where component libraries come in. With component libraries, teams can reuse pre-built components that follow the set design standards. Some use Material UI, Ant Design, or Chakra UI, while others build custom component libraries. The next question is: how do teams build, test, and document these components? That’s where Storybook comes in.
Storybook is a sandbox tool for UI components. Developers can modify a component, test its different states, and preview how it looks without affecting the rest of the app. Storybook provides an interactive catalog and a shared component library where other teams can view and use the latest UI components in real time. Storybook isn’t just for developers—it’s also a living documentation tool and a must-have for companies adopting micro frontends for their sites.
Storybook: A developer playground for UI components
With Figma tokens and Storybook integrations, design updates can automatically sync with the component library, eliminating manual back-and-forth updates across multiple teams. Here’s how:
This level of automation eliminates the classic ‘developer vs designer’ misalignment. It ensures that UI changes are consistent, scalable, and instantly reflected across all micro frontends.
Why is automating design-to-code workflows important?
It maintains UI consistency. Since teams often own different frontend modules, Storybook linking with an automated design workflow ensures uniformity and automatic updates with zero manual intervention. For example, if the spacing rules across components are changed, updating design tokens in Figma would instantly propagate these changes to Storybook, where teams can provide visual confirmation before pushing the changes to production.
Discipline: The backbone of a successful design system
Without clear guidelines, a scalable structure, and robust governance, even the best design systems could fall apart over time. Teams must stay committed to keeping design and code in sync, using automated workflows like Figma tokens and CI/CD pipelines to avoid inconsistencies. Success hinges on clear ownership, thoughtful vision, and continuous learning. It requires a shared mindset that values consistencies over quick fixes, collaboration over silos, and a process that grows with the team rather than slows them down.
The future of application building is modular
The evolution from monolithic to micro frontends is becoming the standard for scalable, maintainable frontend development. The best part about the transition is that companies don’t need to adopt everything overnight. Instead, start with a simple component library or use Storybook for UI development. And then take further steps toward frontend modernization.
