The even the best container-based application platforms like NAIS are inadvertently better suited for microservices and more traditional backend applications, often leaving much to be desired for single page applications that have their own unique challenges.

At the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV) we have over 100 product teams running 1.600 applications on our application platform, 400 of which are frontend applications. Most of them written in React or Next.js, but other frontend frameworks is still in existence as well.

These applications does not get the benefit of our Prometheus monitoring, automatic SQL-database creation, cluster network security policies and many other features available from our application platform and they often have to do the heavy lifting of build their own micro-frontend architecture, monitoring, testing and much more.

At NAV we have perfected our container application platform for the better part of a decade. Along the way we have started a dedicated data platform (NADA) and since 2022 we have started a new team dedicated towards building platform services for our frontend developers to give them the best tools to build and run their frontend applications.

As far as we know, NAV is the first government agency in Norway to build a platform specifically for frontend application and we are super excited to share how far we have come 🚀