Fathym vs. Netlify and Vercel | Micro Frontends open up possibilities

February 14, 2022 by Rich Kurtzman, Brand Communications @ Fathym

When it comes to hosting, there are some familiar names out there in Netlify and Vercel. Fathym may be the new kid on the block, but we’re bringing some new ideas, too.

The most important differentiator for Fathym is micro frontends. Fathym not only hosts your site, but it’s hosted with our micro frontends platform. No more monolithic architecture behind the scenes, at least, not with us.

The micro frontends approach means breaking down that bigger structure into bite-sized pieces, allowing multiple teams or multiple individuals to work concurrently on the same, larger end goal. This means more autonomy; it means teams can release and scale products independently of other teams. It also allows QA to get involved earlier in the process with manual and automated testing.

Fathym means multiple teams contributing

With Netlify and Vercel, if multiple developers are working on the same site, there’s only one GitHub repository. Sure, each developer can create their own branch while working on tasks, and merge back into the main branch when they’re done. But if “Team Photo Gallery” is not done with their task, then “Team Store” and “Team Blog” both must wait before they can update the production site – because they all share the same GitHub repository.

UPDATE: With Vercel, Netlify and other cloud hosting solutions, like Amazon Lightsail and Azure Static Web Apps, you can work to achieve some aspects of micro frontends. This often involves a series of server rewrite rules, mono-repos and hosting across multiple domains. That may be right for your organization, but with Fathym we are exploring micro frontends as a core part of your team workflow, as defined by others in the space.

For more: Martin Fowler on Micro Frontends.

The differentiator with Fathym is your entire site doesn’t have to be in one GitHub repo. Teams can make as many different repos as they desire, based on the site they’re building. With micro frontends, each repo is tied to a route, like website.com/blog or /store or /photos. This allows teams to scale and release products independently of other teams. “Team Store” and “Team Blog” can both release updates to the production site, without worrying if “Team Photo Gallery” is behind schedule.

Micro frontends are an architectural style where independently deliverable frontend applications are composed into a greater whole.

“Micro frontends enable work to be done concurrently,” engineer Trevor Richardson said. “Let’s say an engineer makes some changes to the store. Independent from what other teams are doing, they can hand off to QA and begin testing. Once tests pass, the store updates can be pushed to the live site. The great thing is the end user has no idea the site is using micro frontends. As a site visitor, it feels and acts like a normal site.”

Along with micro frontends, Fathym also provides release management, built-in security, works with custom domains, allows you to host any GitHub branch and switch to any build version, all within a single interface. Any Jamstack language is supported out of the box. Fathym even provides API proxies for older legacy code. It's all still your code, just managed better.

“Fathym was so easy to use. It makes me look impressive!” developer George Hatch said.

Join Fathym

We encourage you to join Fathym today, for free, and give us feedback on what you like and dislike. We actively engage with our community and want to add the features you want the most.