The role of micro frontends in Cytiva’s XM Cloud journey

Cytiva is a global provider of technologies and services that advance and accelerate the development and manufacture of therapeutics.

The company operates in over 40 countries and territories across Europe, Asia, North and Latin America, and the Middle East.

At a breakout session at Sitecore Symposium 2024, Viktor Kudrenko, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Cytiva and Nikolai Kononov, Staff Software Engineer at Cytiva walked through how they made the move from their monolithic solution to XM Cloud and leveraged micro frontends and microservices architecture.

At Cytiva, the IT department is dedicated to delivering the ecommerce functionality for cytiva.com, with 11 teams located around the world, including Poland, Ukraine, China, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

Cytiva’s monolithic Sitecore 9.3 solution was handling 170 projects and struggling to meet rising demands. Meanwhile, development teams were facing several frustrating challenges.

• Slow development speed: As the application grew, the codebase became more complex, making it more difficult to develop new features.
• Deployment challenges: Any change, even a small one, required the entire application to be retested and redeployed which was time-consuming and risky.
• Scalability issues: Scaling a monolithic solution proved difficult as the entire application had to be scaled, even if only one part of it needed more resources.
• Maintenance: Maintaining and updating the codebase became increasingly challenging.
• Merge conflicts: This led to development delays, code quality issues, and team frustrations.
• Docker: Instability led to wasted time for developers and a slow development process.

As a result, any bug fix or new feature would take five weeks to deliver, which was far from ideal in a competitive market.

Next, Kudrenko and Kononov spoke about their reasons for choosing Sitecore XM Cloud, saying it was a ‘game-changer’ with a MACH architecture that prompted their team to adopt micro frontends and microservices architecture to address their existing challenges.

Benefits of Sitecore XM Cloud

Several factors influenced Cytiva’s decision to move to Sitecore XM Cloud.

• Scalable content delivery: Ability to deliver content at scale with Experience Edge, right out of the box.
• Automatic upgrades: Seamless automatic updates eliminate the need for manual upgrades.
• Flexible frameworks: The freedom to choose preferred front-end and content delivery frameworks.
• Seamless integration: Easy integration with existing DevOps and development architectures.
• GraphQL: Simple data querying with GraphQL.
• Responsive support: Fast and reliable support from Sitecore.
• Docker: Official Sitecore support out of the box.

Micro frontends–where independently developed frontends are composed into a greater whole–have been central to Cytiva’s successful move to Sitecore XM Cloud.

Why micro frontends?

Modular: Each micro frontend is a self-contained module that can be developed, tested, and deployed independently.

Composable: Micro frontends are designed to be composed together to create a larger application.

Resilience: As each micro frontend is self-contained, failure in one micro frontend should not affect the overall functionality of the application.

Scalability: It is easier to scale development with a micro frontends architecture as each micro frontend can be developed independently by separate teams.

Maintenance: It is easier to maintain a large application because each micro frontend can be updated and maintained independently.

The session concluded with Kudrenko and Kononov sharing their five most important learnings from their experience leveraging micro frontends.

1. A smaller codebase makes refactoring or replacement more manageable.
2. The overall developer experience has significantly improved.
3. Each team can now release new features or bug fixes as soon as they are ready.
4. Teams can operate autonomously within their areas of expertise.
5. Teams can deploy code independently on their own schedules and deployment now takes just three minutes instead of two hours.

Learn more about why leading brands are choosing a composable approach.