Energy Consumption of Micro Frontends : A comparison of micro frontends and single-page applications

Sammanfattning: To combat climate change, an important part is reducing our energy consumption and the greenhouse gas emissions caused by it. Therefore, it is important that developers get the means to understand how the different development approaches and tools they use affect the ecological footprint of the systems they develop. Consequently, it is important to analyse the ecological effects of new development approaches. One such approach that has recently started to gain popularity within the tech industry, is the micro frontend architecture—the frontend version of microservices. One of its praised advantages over the more traditional monolithic single-page architecture, is the flexibility it provides to organizations managing larger applications. However, little research has been conducted to investigate how this architecture affects the energy consumption of web applications compared to the single-page architecture. This research aims to fill this gap. To investigate the architecture’s effects on energy consumption, two prototypes of a single application were implemented: one as a single-page application (SPA) and one as a micro frontend application (MFA). Both prototypes were implemented in TypeScript with the framework React. Integration of the multiple micro frontends in the MFA was done with the common micro frontend framework single-spa. Four different use case scenarios were executed on the two prototypes while the power profiler GreenFrame was used to extract power consumption estimates. No prototype was found to be the most energy efficient in all scenarios. However, the energy consumption of the two prototypes was significantly different in most scenarios. Furthermore, the results indicate that the micro frontend architecture may introduce an energy consumption increase on the client side. To confirm the findings and to get a better understanding of the architecture in general it is important that further research is performed with more varied applications and setups.