Backend for Frontend (BFF) as a Gateway to the World of Microservices

Microservices are one of the predominant architectural patterns today. They can be used to break down a system into a number of small, independent processes. Once you have done this, the question arises as to how the front end communicates with all the microservices. Simply having the frontend communicate directly with all microservices is not a good way to go. The connection between the frontend and the individual microservices becomes too tightly coupled and the independence of the microservices can get lost. Backends for frontends and API gateways are patterns from the area of ​​distributed systems that can provide very good services at exactly this point. They provide a central entry point for the frontend to all microservices. They route calls to the correct microservices and aggregate data for the frontend so that it receives an optimized Json object for each view or feature. This ultimately saves calls and bandwidth in communication and increases performance and thus the user experience. In addition to the points mentioned, other topics can also be addressed, such as collecting telemetry data or authentication and authorization. This talk will take a closer look at how a modern and flexible backend for frontend can be developed with .NET and open source libraries. During the talk different aspects of such an implementation is presented in various live demos.