Chapter 2. Installing and Virtualizing Node Servers
Recall the story from Chapter 1, Appreciating Node, about how Walmart ran all of its Black Friday mobile traffic through Node, which was deployed across the equivalent of 2 CPUs and 30 gigs of RAM. This demonstrates that Node processes I/O so efficiently that even Walmart-level traffic on Black Friday can be handled with only a few servers. This means that, for many people, running your Node application on a single server is all you'll ever need to do.
Nevertheless, it is often good to have several servers at your disposal, such as redundant servers to ensure failover recovery, a distinct database server, specialized media servers, one hosting a message queue, and so on. In keeping with the idea of separating concerns into many independent processes, Node-based applications are often composed of many lightweight servers spread across a data center, possibly even spread across several data centers.
In this chapter, we will...
