Microfrontends on Vercel

Picture a food truck lot. You might have a taco truck, a burger truck, a shrimp truck. Each truck is independent and can operate without coordinating with the others. They all exist in the same space though and provide a unified experience to customers. The owner of the lot might build a bar, hire a band, and coordinate a cleaning service, but the trucks can operate independently.

This is the microfrontend pattern. Microfrontends let teams work independently on large-scale applications without stepping on each other's toes. When your monolith's build times balloon past 5 minutes and deploys become coordination nightmares, splitting your frontend into independently owned pieces restores sanity.

Vercel handles the complexity at the platform layer, composing independent applications into a seamless experience for users. This course teaches you to build, deploy, and operate production microfrontends without the usual infrastructure headaches.

What you'll build

Complete Multi-Zone Platform:

• Marketing Site: Default application that catches unmatched routes
• Documentation App: Independent docs site served at /docs/*
• Dashboard App: Protected application at /app/* and /settings/*

Shared Infrastructure:

• UI Package: Header, Footer, and design system components shared across all apps
• Utils Package: Auth helpers, API clients, and shared utilities
• Config Package: TypeScript, ESLint, and Tailwind configurations

Production Patterns:

• Local Development Proxy: Run all apps simultaneously through port 3024
• Routing Tests: Validate configurations before deployment
• Debug Observability: Inspect routing decisions with headers and traces
• Feature Flag Routing: Route users to different apps based on flags

How this course teaches

This isn't architecture theory. You'll build everything from scratch:

• Start with decisions - Evaluate whether microfrontends solve your actual problems
• Build incrementally - Add complexity only when you understand the foundation
• Deploy early - See routing work in production before adding features
• Debug real issues - Handle asset conflicts, path isolation, and fallback behavior
• Ship working code - Every lesson produces deployable, production-ready configuration

Prerequisites

Before diving in, make sure you're familiar with:

• Next.js: Comfortable with App Router, routing, and basic configuration
• Vercel: Experience deploying applications to Vercel
• Monorepos: Basic understanding of workspaces (pnpm, npm, or yarn)
• Git: Version control for managing multiple applications
• Node.js: Latest LTS version (v20 or later)
• pnpm: Package manager used throughout the course
• Vercel account: Create one for free

Framework scope: This course uses Next.js for all examples. The concepts apply to other supported frameworks (SvelteKit, Vite, React Router) but code samples are Next.js specific.

What you'll build & learn in this course

This course is split into four sections:

1. Foundations: Evaluate microfrontends and set up your monorepo structure
2. Vertical Microfrontends: Configure, develop, and deploy multi-zone applications
3. Production Patterns: Performance, testing, observability, and security
4. Advanced Patterns: Feature flags, incremental migration, and remote components

Each section builds on the previous one. Follow the order for best results.

Section 1: Foundations

Evaluate whether microfrontends solve your specific scaling challenges:

• Decision Framework: Understand the two primary use cases: scaling DX and incremental migration
• Architecture Patterns: Learn vertical (multi-zone) vs horizontal (remote components) approaches
• Monorepo Setup: Configure Turborepo with apps and shared packages
• Project Structure: Create the directory layout for a production multi-zone application

You'll gain clarity on when microfrontends make sense and set up the foundation for building them.

Section 2: Vertical Microfrontends

Build and deploy your first multi-zone application on Vercel:

• Configuration Basics: Write microfrontends.json and wrap Next.js configs with withMicrofrontends
• Path Routing: Configure routing patterns and understand the execution order (Firewall → Microfrontends → Headers → Redirects → Middleware → Rewrites)
• The Middleware Shift: Understand why central middleware breaks with microfrontends - requests route directly to child apps, skipping your default app's middleware entirely
• Local Development: Run multiple apps through the microfrontends proxy at localhost:3024
• Shared Packages: Build reusable UI components and utilities across applications
• Deployment Workflow: Deploy to Vercel with proper group configuration and fallback behavior

By the end, you'll have a complete multi-zone application deployed and routing correctly.

Section 3: Production Patterns

Make your microfrontends production-ready:

• Navigation Performance: Optimize cross-app navigation with Speculation Rules prefetching
• Testing Strategies: Validate routing configuration with @vercel/microfrontends/next/testing
• Observability: Monitor routing decisions with debug headers and Vercel Observability
• Security and Firewall: Configure deployment protection and WAF rules across applications

Each lesson adds operational capabilities that catch problems before users do.

Section 4: Advanced Patterns

Apply microfrontends to real-world scenarios:

• Feature Flag Routing: Route requests to different microfrontends based on flags for safe rollouts
• Incremental Migration: Apply the strangler fig pattern to migrate from legacy applications
• Remote Components: Understand when horizontal microfrontends (component-level sharing) make sense
• Conclusion: Decision framework and next steps for choosing the right pattern

By the end, you'll have strategies for gradual rollouts, legacy migrations, and architectural decisions.

---

By the end of this course, you'll know how to evaluate, build, deploy, and operate production microfrontends on Vercel. Ready to start? Let's begin with understanding when microfrontends actually make sense.