What Is Front-End-as-a-Service and Why You Need It

In the age of massive business digitization and the release of numerous mobile and web apps, it’s getting harder for companies to make their digital solutions stand out. Now, business apps go further than just being a tool to solve customers’ problems. They should also provide unique user experience and engage users to spend more time in the apps.

For businesses, ensuring the best user experience means keeping up with the latest technologies, quick app upgrades, and their bugless operation, especially on the front-end layer. All these involve hard work of software development teams and much investment. One of the recent solutions to make releases faster, cheaper, and with fewer bugs is to use Front-end-as-a-Service.

In this article, we’ll explain what Front-end-as-a-Service is, why it is quickly becoming an optimum solution for many companies, and how you could implement it for your app development.

What Is Front-End-as-a-Service?

Nowadays the concept of moving from a monolith architecture to microservices is becoming a viable solution for various businesses. Many companies now prefer building their apps using autonomous blocks that software engineers bind together into a standalone digital app.

Front-end-as-a-Service uses microservices in the cloud. It provides programmers with front-end modules that can be combined into a quick solution with the focus on serviceability.

For example, to build a solid e-Commerce app, software engineers need to develop core functions, including shopping cart, checkout, search and filters, customer data, helpdesk, chatbots, and others. With Front-end-as-a-Service, programmers don’t need to create these functionalities from scratch. Instead, they can select the best components provided by the Front-end as a Service cloud platforms. By quickly joining them together, software engineers can create robust and cutting-edge e-Commerce apps with outstanding functionality.

The Rise of Front-End-as-a-Service

The rise of Front-end-as-a-Service happened with the development of omnichannel marketing strategy in e-Commerce. In the beginning, building a full-stack e-Commerce website with closely linked front and back-end layers was enough to attract the majority of buying traffic.

Today, to stay on top of customers’ expectations, having a website accessible only via the web isn’t enough. Businesses strive to reach their customers through multiple channels,  building a complex matrix of customer touchpoints. This omnichannel approach demands higher flexibility from full-stack digital apps. That’s what Front-end-as-a-Service can offer:

• decouple front-end and back-end layers so that programmers can implement front-end features independently without running changes in the back-end layer;
• utilize microservice architecture to quickly combine or build new front-end features;
• automate the configuration of development infrastructure, therefore, software developers can devote more time to the app’s business logic development.

Advantages of Front-End-as-a-Service

According to recent Gartner’s research, e-Commerce is shifting to cloud-based nature with a “composable” development approach. It means that most of the e-Commerce functions will be developed as microservices in clouds and implemented as API SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) services. Therefore, Front-end-as-a-Service technology will become more widespread in the future. What does it mean for e-commerce businesses? And what benefits can these companies reap from the implementation of Front-end-as-a-Service? Let’s have a closer look at the advantages Front-end-as-a-Service can offer.

Faster Time-to-Market

With Front-end-as-a-Service, software developers can quickly create their apps’ MVPs without losing on the UX/UI quality. When creating their first product version, programmers mostly focus on the main idea of the app and its functionality, virtually the back-end of the app, paying less attention to its visual elements and convenience. However, it’s the UX/UI which makes the product popular among users. Front-end-as-a-Service allows building MVPs fast, keeping the UX/UI quality at a high level in the apps.

Resource Saving

Front-end-as-a-Service is a simple-to-grasp concept for front-end developers. It has tools and libraries that programmers use in their work on a daily basis. Therefore, it won’t require any unique know-how experts to work with the technology nor much training for the existing specialists in your team.

Apart from that, Front-end-as-a-Service doesn’t require hiring additional specialists, it also saves businesses much time and budget. Software engineers don’t have to spend days creating basic app features from zero. Instead, they can use ready-made functionalities from best-of-breed vendors to build the most outstanding UI/UX designs effortlessly.

System Failure Risk Mitigation

As Front-end-as-a-Service software developers use pre-built and tested blocks of code to create their digital solutions, they minimize the number of potential bugs in the app. Moreover, many reliable and time-tested vendors provide their functionalities to embed in the developed apps. For example, these vendors can offer their own CMS, BaaS, CRM, ERP, and other systems to integrate into your digital solution.

Rapid Implementation of Top Functionalities

When using front-end development as a service, companies ensure the continuous development of their product. They can implement the latest UX/UI trends provided by the vendors, simply and quickly implement new features, and test them with their target audiences.

Besides that, Front-end-as-a-Service allows businesses to push more releases. With front-end development, it’s simple to embed innovations on apps’ front-end layers without changing the back-end.

Simple Scalability

Front-end-as-a-Service has a modular structure in its core. Therefore, software developers can simply scale up and down the developed apps, depending on the business needs or customers’ feedback. This way, companies can better align their apps with their customers’ needs and adjust them to their current business requirements.

Bottom Line

Front-end-as-a-Service is a recently emerged trend that is quickly spreading among many businesses. E-Commerce companies were among the first ones who saw a great capacity in the technology and many of them are already using Front-end-as-a-Service for building their digital solutions.

The technology allows companies to swiftly create top-notch and impressive UX/UI designs that look consistent on any device. It provides a strong potential for businesses to grow and stay updated with the latest trends in the front-end development market.