The Back-end for Front-end Pattern (BFF)
When I was at SoundCloud, being transparent about our architecture evolution was part of our technology strategy. Something we’ve talked about on countless occasions but never really described in detail was our application of the Back-end for Front-end architecture pattern, or BFF. This post documents my understanding of how we developed and applied this technique.
Before fully distributed architectures became feasible, organisations would usually build an application in one or more tiers. A tier was a highly-coupled, but fairly independent component of an application. It was coupled in the sense that, as opposed to services, it was meant to be used by one application only. It was independent in how it didn’t run as part of the same process, often not even in the same machine.
These architectures could get very complicated, but overall it was very easy to draw a line between the different applications, clearly demarcating where one starts and the other ends.
