Micro Frontends at Scale with Luca Mezzalira (O’Reilly Author and Principal Architect at AWS)

https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Podcasts211/v4/04/20/c5/0420c5be-d1fd-d093-9dfe-c13fc2da3627/mza_10716373771984734847.jpg/600x600bb.jpg

Señors at Scale

Dan Neciu

21 episodes

3 days ago

Welcome to Señors at Scale, the podcast where seasoned engineers spill the secrets, successes, and facepalms of building and maintaining software at scale. Join host Neciu Dan as we sit down with Staff Engineers, Principal Engineers, and other senior technologists to dive deep into the hard-won lessons of distributed systems, technical leadership, and scaling products that refuse to stay small. From war stories in incident response to behind-the-scenes architecture decisions, each episode brings a mix of practical insights, hard truths, and a healthy dose of dev humor. If you’ve ever wrang

Technology

RSS

All content for Señors at Scale is the property of Dan Neciu and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

Technology

https://d3t3ozftmdmh3i.cloudfront.net/staging/podcast_uploaded_nologo/43958857/43958857-1752848017873-04201c3a562d.jpg

Micro Frontends at Scale with Luca Mezzalira (O’Reilly Author and Principal Architect at AWS)

Señors at Scale

1 hour 8 minutes 20 seconds

2 months ago

Micro Frontends at Scale with Luca Mezzalira (O’Reilly Author and Principal Architect at AWS)

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Dan sits down with Luca Mezzalira, Principal Serverless Specialist at AWS and author of Building Micro-Frontends, for a deep and highly practical look at scaling frontend architectures for hundreds of developers.

Luca shares the real story behind how micro-frontends were born — from his early experiments at DAZN trying to scale a live sports platform across 40 devices and 500+ engineers, to pioneering techniques that cut app startup times from 40 seconds to 12.

We break down how distributed frontends actually work:
How to design stable application shells with zero global state,
How to compose independently deployed views without iframes, and how guardrails like bundle-size budgets and canary deployments keep massive systems fast and safe.

Luca also explains the hidden challenges most teams miss — governance, team topology, and socio-technical design.
He shows how to evolve from a monolith to micro-frontends step by step, using edge routing, feature flags, and domain-driven design to scale safely without rewrites.

The conversation goes beyond theory — into the mechanics of migration, platform teams, CI/CD pipelines, and why friction in your system is actually a signal, not a failure.

If you’re leading a frontend platform, planning a migration, or just trying to make sense of where micro-frontends actually fit, this episode is a masterclass in autonomy, architecture, and evolution at scale.

Chapters
00:00 The Origin of Micro-Frontends at DAZN05:41 Building a Distributed Frontend Without iFrames08:50 Designing the Application Shell and Stateless Architecture12:23 Zero Global State and Memory Management15:53 Guardrails for Bundle Size and Developer Discipline17:39 Governance and Designing for Scale20:18 When (and When Not) to Adopt Micro-Frontends22:46 Canary Releases and Edge Routing for Safe Migration25:49 Vertical vs Horizontal Splits in Micro-Frontends31:30 Lessons from Building the First Edition of the Book35:38 Frameworks, Federation, and Modern Tools39:22 Core Principles of Successful Frontend Architecture42:06 Building Platform Teams and Core Governance44:19 When Micro-Frontends Don’t Make Sense47:50 Micro-Frontends for Small Teams and Startups49:32 Monorepo vs Polyrepo – What Actually Matters53:10 Preventing Duplication and Encouraging Communication57:39 Why a Design System Is Non-Negotiable59:17 Common Anti-Patterns in Micro-Frontend Architecture

1:03:33 Book Recommendations and Final Thoughts

Follow & Subscribe:
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev
🎙 Podcast: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale
📬 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/se%C3%B1ors-scale/

Additional Resources

📘 Building Micro-Frontends – Luca Mezzalira (O’Reilly) buildingmicrofrontends.com

🌐 buildingmfe.com

💬 Luca’s Blog: https://lucamezzalira.com

#microfrontends #aws #frontendarchitecture #javascript #webdevelopment #softwareengineering #softwarearchitecture #react #scaling #teamtopologies #serverless #señorsatscale

Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more engineering stories from the front lines.

How is your team approaching frontend scaling and independence? Share below 👇