Chapter 7. Scalability and Architectural Patterns

In its early days, Node.js was mainly a non-blocking web server; its original name was in fact web.js. Its creator, Ryan Dahl, soon realized the potential of the platform and started extending it with tools to enable the creation of any type of server-side application on top of the duo JavaScript/non-blocking paradigm. The characteristics of Node.js were perfect for the implementation of distributed systems, made of nodes orchestrating their operations through the network. Node.js was born to be distributed. Unlike other web platforms, the word scalability enters the vocabulary of a Node.js developer very early in the life of an application, mainly because of its single-threaded nature, incapable of exploiting all the resources of a machine, but often there are more profound reasons. As we will see in this chapter, scaling an application does not only mean increasing its capacity, enabling it to handle more requests faster; it's also a crucial...