Understanding front end as a service (FEaaS)

Front end as a service (FEaaS) simplifies the process of building and maintaining scalable front ends. It accelerates development by offering cloud infrastructure and ready-made components, allowing you to go to market faster with reduced upfront costs.

This article explains the key features and benefits for front end as a service, how it compares to traditional frontend development, and what its drawbacks are. By the end of this article, you will know what FEaaS is, how it can benefit you, and ultimately whether it's right for your use case.

What is front end as a service (FEaaS)?

Imagine a modular house that you build from pre-made sections that connect directly to power and water, and don't require that you pour foundations or hire electricians or plumbers. This is what front end as a service is to web development: You are provided with a fully managed cloud infrastructure and pre-made web-app components allowing you to build and customize your front end quickly, but at the cost of some customizability and flexibility.

This trade-off is attractive to many businesses, as it allows them to get their ideas off the ground and go to market in less time with a responsive, performant, and secure application.

Building blocks, not blueprints: Front end as a service (FEaaS) provides a managed, streamlined environment for app development, at the cost of some customizability.

Examples of popular front end as a service platforms

Some FEaaS platforms cater to developers, providing a software development kit (SDK) with pre-built components. Others are aimed at users with less technical expertise and offer an interface with a drag-and-drop editor requiring little to no coding.

Below is a selection of different FEaaS platforms with use cases, some of the features they offer, and whether they are intended for technical users with programming experience or non-technical users who want to build with a graphical interface.

What are the benefits of front end as a service for developers?

Speed and cost efficiency

FEaaS reduces development time dramatically; this allows teams to realize projects and bring them to market in a fraction of the time it would have taken otherwise. In a highly competitive market, this can make all of the difference, giving businesses that use FEaaS the first mover advantage.

Development teams are often rushed to complete something in time, juggling priorities such as the quality of the code, modularity, and performance. FEaaS platforms streamline the development process by providing pre-built components and templates that include best practices.

The reduction in development time comes with reduced labor costs, as well as minimizing ongoing maintenance costs due to management by the FEaaS provider. Scalable pricing models also allow businesses to use the infrastructure that suits their needs.

Integration with other systems

On the whole, FEaaS platforms are designed to easily consume APIs, and they provide tools and frameworks that make it easy to integrate your own back end. For example, this case study details how Hobbycraft quickly revamped their front end by creating a progressive web app, improving their mobile experience, and easily connecting this new front end with their legacy backend system. In the process, they increased their revenue by 30%.

FEaaS naturally supports composability, allowing you to assemble and interchange different components to build complex applications. FEaaS platforms have a wide array of plugins to extend functionality and are very flexible, enabling them to be connected to other systems. 

FEaaS platforms aim to simplify these connections by offering built-in solutions and SDKs, where you can connect components through a REST API or GraphQL, making sure data flows smoothly throughout the application.

Alternatively, you might choose a FEaaS ecommerce platform that can handle things like inventory, pricing, and order processing for you, and then pair that with a headless CMS, which could provide content like blog posts and product descriptions through an API. In short, you can use pre-built components so as not to reinvent the wheel.

Reduced development time and maintenance

When applications outgrow their initial infrastructure, it can be difficult to maintain the same level of performance. FEaaS solutions include performance optimizations and scalable infrastructure hosted in the cloud, and many platforms deliver frontend assets to the edge to improve loading speeds for your users.

FEaaS platforms typically handle maintenance and ongoing updates. This lifts the burden from the development team, allowing them to focus their time on critical tasks, which can lead to a faster, more efficient development process.

Making sure that the user interface is responsive across various screen sizes can be challenging, and considering 53% of mobile visits are abandoned if pages take longer than three seconds to load, this is a major pain point. Some FEaaS platforms offer responsive, pre-tested components, ensuring a high-quality user experience across mobile and desktop.

Technical breakdown: What features do FEaaS platforms provide?

Reusable components

Pre-made components can cover a wide range of possible functionality, such as accordions, badges, cards, checkout carts, and pagination. Some also come with functionality like lazy loading.

Most FEaaS platforms include their own components (or integrate popular component libraries), with documentation detailing what properties you can pass through to customize functionality as well as any lifecycle callback arguments. Some platforms also offer design files, which you can use to create mockups with the provided components. This is useful if you are still at the ideation stage and want to present different ideas.

Integrations and utility functions

Many FEaaS platforms support API-first architecture, which makes it easy to integrate with a variety of backend systems, such as a headless CMS like Contentful or marketing tools like HubSpot. These integrations are typically ready to use out of the box, but some may require connecting through an SDK.

The provided utilities may be functions for anything from checking types to connecting to Redux actions, and serve as a reusable library.

Analytics integrations centralize the code used for tracking any events that happen in your front end that you may want to capture and send to your analytics service, such as Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics.

Custom styles

To customize the look of the application, most platforms allow you to apply custom styles with CSS. Some may have theme overrides where you can adjust the default styles without editing each one individually. 

Support for responsively scaling to different screen sizes is usually built into the components, so you don’t need to worry about responsiveness.

Maintenance and performance

Once a system has been built, it typically requires a development team to maintain and improve the code, making sure it's up to date with modern web and security standards, and continues to meet users’ expectations for performance and features.

FEaaS takes much of this burden away from your team. You only need to maintain the smaller amount of code you've written on top of their foundation or to extend their components, and you don’t need to worry about maintaining infrastructure, so your security responsibilities are reduced.

FEaaS providers also handle the cloud infrastructure, taking the burden of DevOps and deployment away from your development team.

What does FEaaS provide to users?

FEaaS can provide several benefits to your audience, customers, and users:

• Your apps will load faster as FEaaS platforms utilize content delivery networks (CDNs). Any assets for the front end will be distributed by a global CDN with servers close to the user, reducing latency and improving page load speeds.

• Your user interfaces will be more consistent and performant across different screen sizes and devices, allowing your users to browse easily and without frustration across mobile and desktop.

• The hosted cloud infrastructure will normally offer high availability and automatic scaling, translating to minimal downtime and ensuring your app remains performant in peak usage hours.

• Most platforms offer security in line with best practices, ensuring data is transmitted securely. They also provide regular security updates to address any vulnerabilities, providing a safer online experience for your users.

How does front end as a service compare to other architectures?

Traditional monolithic front ends

In a monolithic architecture, all of the code and assets (including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) for an application are built and deployed as a single codebase; this includes the user interface, logic, and presentation, and any SDKs and APIs used to connect to data.

Over time, as the codebase becomes larger and more complex, it can be hard to maintain and make even minor changes, as any bug that needs fixing or any feature that you might implement requires sifting through a large interconnected set of dependencies, functions, and services.

While this architecture still might be an attractive option for smaller projects as it's less complex to have everything in one place, many teams don't require this setup, especially if you're looking to scale.

Micro front ends: A complex alternative

Micro front ends are an architectural style that extends the concept of a microservices-based architecture. Rather than having the whole application in one place, you split it up into different parts.

This could be split by feature, allowing development teams to work simultaneously on different functionalities (for example, one team works on the checkout and another works on the search functionality). This code exists apart in different repositories, keeping code separated and easy to debug.

In the end, everything comes together to make the whole application. This architectural choice can be beneficial for large-scale applications and organizations with multiple teams working on the same product.

While micro front ends offer modularity and will probably save time and money, building them from scratch is time-consuming and complex and more suited to large-scale projects.

What are the drawbacks to front end as a service?

• Platform lock-in: If you use the platform's SDK and all of its components to build your front end, then you are essentially tied to that platform. If you later need to build a custom feature that the platform cannot accommodate, this may require switching providers or rebuilding the front end from scratch.

• Potential learning curve: All FEaaS platforms will have their own way of doing things, and their SDKs may have a learning curve. You may have developers who are used to doing things in a certain way and they’ll have to re-learn for the sake of the specific platform you use.

• Downtime and service interruptions: Although most platforms offer scalable architecture that is built with best practices in mind, mistakes can still happen. If, for instance, the company is hacked with a denial of service attack and their systems go down, then your front end will not be accessible until they fix the problem.

• Lack of flexibility / customization limits: If you want a completely unique-looking UI or custom logic, you may be limited by FEaaS platforms, which prioritize generalized design and functionality concepts that can be widely adopted.

• Subscription fees: Considering that building your application the traditional way requires a significant initial investment of time and money, not to mention the ongoing maintenance costs, FEaaS seems like a no-brainer; however, fees can change over time and functionality you are using can be put behind a higher pricing tier.

When to use FEaaS

FEaaS is ideal for development teams that want to be able to build quickly and rely on standard UI and business logic that FEaaS platforms provide, and where the platform supports any existing platforms they use to host their data.

• Ecommerce companies, for instance, may benefit by speeding up time-to-market with the pre-built components and ready-made integrations for services such as payment processing, headless ecommerce, inventory management, or analytics tools.

• Startups often have limited budgets, so taking the time and complexity out of the front end can save them money and allow their development resources to focus on core business logic.

• Large organizations may have legacy systems, and FEaaS offers easy API integration, so it can help them modernize their front end without having to overhaul their entire infrastructure.

If you require complete control and customization over every aspect of your front end, building from scratch, or using a more flexible app framework might be necessary. If reducing initial cost, maintenance, and go-to-market times are more important, then FEaaS may be a better option for you.

How to implement front end as a service

Before doing anything, it's important to identify the goals of your project. What do you want to achieve by using FEaaS? You should define the scope and identify the key components you need. Make a thorough evaluation of the FEaaS provider and determine what their capabilities are (for example, UI components, templates, state management, and performance). Determine how the provider will handle scalability to fit your current and future needs. The pricing model will also be another important metric to weigh up. 

For example, if you were tasked with building a blog, you could use a headless CMS like the one offered by Contentful. You could start by defining your content model, including elements such as blog posts, user profiles, and comments, and structuring them to be delivered easily through the API, then mapping out which frontend components you will need from your FEaaS provider (such as cards, infinite scroll, and headers).

Once you have the components imported into your project and styled to fit your branding, you can connect the data to the user interface. After fully testing your application, you can deploy it to production using provided cloud infrastructure.

A composable architecture benefits developers and users

By pairing the streamlined development and deployment offered by front end as a service and a platform like Contentful, you can reduce development time, complexity, and overall costs of maintaining both your front- and backend code. 

Contentful provides a scalable API-driven content management back end that can be configured to your specific needs, so that you can focus on innovation and provide your users with a fast and reliable content experience.

If you want to learn more about how Contentful can enhance your product, contact us and see how we can help you.

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