Node.js Design Patterns: Master a series of patterns and techniques to create modular, scalable, and efficient applications

by Mario Casciaro

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 path to achieving high availability and tolerance to errors. Amazingly, it can also be a way to split the complexity of an application into more manageable pieces. Scalability is a concept with multiple faces, six to be precise, as many as the faces of a cube—the scale cube.