MicroFrontend at Scale with Igor (Cloudflare, co-creator of Angular) and Natalia (PM at Microsoft)

Description

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Dan chats with Natalia Venditto, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft, and Igor Minar, Senior Director of Engineering at Cloudflare and co-creator of Angular, about WebFragments — a radical new approach to micro-frontends that rethinks how we build for the web. Natalia and Igor share how WebFragments was born from years of pain with module federation and brittle micro-frontend systems. They explain why shared dependencies and team coupling still plague large-scale applications, and how WebFragments breaks that pattern by isolating each fragment’s JavaScript and DOM context while still delivering a seamless user experience. We dive deep into the architecture: how iframes are being reinvented for performance and isolation, how Shadow DOM and a technique called Reframing encapsulate code like Docker does for containers, and how Fragment Piercing enables server-rendered fragments to appear instantly — even before the client shell has loaded. The conversation also covers the challenges of building vendor-agnostic, framework-independent systems, the middleware patterns that eliminate CORS issues, and Cloudflare’s real-world migration of its production dashboard to WebFragments. Plus, Natalia and Igor share what’s next — from nested fragments and out-of-order streaming to growing an open-source community around this new model of frontend architecture. Whether you’re building micro-frontends, leading platform teams, or just curious about what’s next for web architecture, this episode is a masterclass in isolation, performance, and pragmatic innovation at scale. --- Chapters 00:00 Introduction to WebFragments and Guests 06:48 Differentiating WebFragments from Module Federation 13:46 The Promise of Independence in Micro-Frontends 16:49 Reframing: A New Approach to Isolation 19:54 The Concept of Piercing in WebFragments 33:26 Fragment Communication and State Management 36:09 Middleware and Request Routing 39:22 WebFragments in Action at Cloudflare 44:02 Getting Started and Migration Path 50:13 Future Developments and Features 54:37 Community and Contributions --- Follow & Subscribe: 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/ 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev 🎙 Podcast URL: 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 Discord: discord.gg/dcgA8YxyCb Early adopters form for anyone interested in high-touch consultation: https://forms.gle/qBHc67iuqbgXjyqm8 Slides from Cloudflare Connect conference: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1PCmshFA5mGNCAA-27WbGyfeT19UXaPDdBloAuD5RvrM/edit?slide=id.p#slide=id.p Main Docs: https://web-fragments.dev/ [https://blog.cloudflare.com/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/) [https://learn.microsoft.com/](https://learn.microsoft.com/) --- #microfrontends #webfragments #javascript #angular #cloudflare #microsoft #frontend #softwarearchitecture #performance #webdevelopment #softwareengineering #señorsatscale Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more engineering stories from the front lines. How is your team approaching micro-frontends and architectural independence? Share below 👇