API, back-end and front-end as all three separate components

user_5572411 0
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I tried to find something on the internet but could not find anything similar. So I'm asking it here:

SITUATION: I have a big API which does some heavy calculations and has a lot of functionality. There are some clients using this API and has implemented it in their software. Now I want to write some front-end for that API so some users could manage their workflow more easily.

CONSIDERED SOLUTION: I am considering of making a separate back-end application which would use an API and serve for the front end (look at the picture attached). The backend would do authorization / caching / data-adapting operations.

QUESTION: But I have never ever crossed such app design with three layers API-BE-FE. So is it worth making things this way? Are there any significant drawbacks? Is it safe to put some oauth authorisation in the back-end side, not api itself? Like what are your thoughts about it?

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2 Answers

I agree with your design. You have a specific API which is meant to serve specific endpoints. This way you are separating your concerns, as you can add to your BE things that aren't related to the API itself, but are related to the FE. Also, many APIs are using credentials and keys so you can implement a similar functionality.

user_54482340

Your considered solution on architecture looks good.

The most biggest advantage to implement a back-end between front-end and API is, it can provide good separation of concerns. It usually happens around me that front-end engineers ask API engineers every time when they need new endpoints. It looks just cooperation, but sometimes goes too much. This kind of conversation has potential to result in making too many endpoints in API which shouldn't have had. I am not really sure what the architecture policy of API team in your company is, but just to allow API to be growing big for front-end is not good. The more functionalities the API has now, the worse it will easily be.

In your plan, you are trying to implement back-end to access API for front-end. It was similar to the architecture of BFF (Back-end For Front-end) described by Sam Newman (http://samnewman.io/patterns/architectural/bff/). With this concept, you can implement a back-end as a kind of a gateway which handles front-end specific requests to API. Back-end can even buffer the potential influence to API caused by change in front-end if needed. Everything can be kept well separated.

In BFF, I don't think that back-end plays a role to provide application-related functionalities such as authorization, caching, and data-adapting operations, but this depends on you. You can implement new APIs to handle those functionalities and have back-end just be a gateway which ties them up. It would also work just to put those things into back-end as long as it is not too fat.

Drawback?

The possible drawback, I suppose, is maintainability of scaling. This totally depends on the infrastructure team or members you work with, but on production, API and backend will run on each different server or stack, so you might need to take care of scaling consistency among them under the large amount of traffic to your application. However, this independency could also be advantageous in monitoring hardware resources. You'd better to find a sweet spot.

user_56167500
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