[thebricksta]

My company uses this pattern extensively, just as indicated in the post. Frontend teams deliver their own backend-for-frontend and the backend teams just worry about their own microservices. Generally, it works out pretty well most of the time.

The big issue I've been seeing is that occasionally frontend teams will decide to develop "features" by stringing together massive series of calls to the backend to implement logic that a singular backend could do much more efficiently. For example, they commonly will have their backend-for-frontend attempt to query large lists of data, even walking through multiple pages, in order to deliver a summary that a backend service could implement in a SQL query. Unnecessary load on the backend service and on the DB to transmit all that data needlessly to the BFF.

I know the easy answer is to blame the frontend devs, but this pattern seems to almost encourage this sort of thing. Frontends try to skip involving the backend teams due to time constraints or just plain naivety, and suddenly the backend team wakes up one morning to find a massive increase in load on their systems triggering alerts, and the frontend team believes its not their fault. This just feels like an innate risk to promoting a frontend team to owning an individual service living in the data center.

[ako]

Many of these backend systems will be Off-the-shelf products, e.g., SAP, Salesforce, Marketto, and lots of other systems people use. Many of these systems don't have APIs that work well for interactive frontends. And you have many different frontends, for your sales people, your project engineers, your marketing department, your different suppliers and partners. These different apps have different data & api needs, and will need to aggregate data from different systems. Systems that cannot be modified to execute the most optimal SQL query for your frontend. And it's too much business logic to put in an API gateway. And all these systems have their own lifecycles, so different project timing, different releases, etc. A BFF makes a lot of sense to make all of this manageable.

[em-bee]

this is what happens when you give frontend teams tools with to much power in an environment where frontend and backend team don't communicate well with each other.

i have seen this first hand with a customer. to their credit, they didn't even have a backend team, until i was brought on board to help them rewrite some of their slower frontend functionality into some more efficient backend functions