Session Management Techniques and Options for Micro-frontend Web Development

Micro-frontends extend the concept of micro-services to the world of UI. The idea behind Micro Frontends is to develop applications as a composition of features which are owned and developed completely isolated and by independent teams. These experiences are strung together either at run-time or build-time to deliver a single cohesive application experience to the end user. Session management, which is a crucial aspect of traditional web development, is also a requisite for micro-frontend applications as it enables the application to maintain the state of a user’s session. This could mean things like preferences, actions, and authentication status across different types of applications and user types. Without session management, the backends would treat each request as a new one, and the user would have to re-enter their credentials, preferences, and data every time they interact with the web application. Traditional application development has some well-defined options to enable session management. For applications implemented as micro-frontends, there are implications specific to that architecture which need to be accounted for. This paper will attempt to review traditional session management methodologies and provide an overview of considerations when using them in micro-frontend style applications.