What is a Back-end For Front-end?

The BFF pattern originates from SoundCloud. They had an app that drained phone batteries. The cause: their microservices. The app had to invoke requests to so many different APIs that the number of open HTTP-connections ended up draining batteries.

The solution was simple: Build a server-side API specifically for one front-end, which collects all the data from all microservices in one go. That way, there’s only one HTTP-connection to be kept open by the app.

So, this is what that looks like:

Read more about the BFF pattern here:

• https://samnewman.io/patterns/architectural/bff/
• https://martinfowler.com/articles/micro-frontends.html
• https://medium.com/@abstarreveld/what-is-a-bff-and-how-to-build-one-e2a2b78cfc43

The BFF Security Pattern

If you have a dedicated back-end for your front-end, a sensable option is to allow the users of your site to log in there. This makes the back-end slightly more complex, but it makes the web application more secure.

Enriching the BFF with authentication is known as the BFF Security Pattern. Read about what the BFF Security Pattern is exactly, and how to implement it.