Scalability and Architectural Patterns

In its early days, Node.js was just a non-blocking web server written in C++ and JavaScript and was called web.js. Its creator, Ryan Dahl, soon realized the potential of the platform and started extending it with tools to enable the creation of different types of server-side applications on top of JavaScript and the non-blocking paradigm.

The characteristics of Node.js are perfect for the implementation of distributed systems, ranging from a few nodes to thousands of nodes communicating through the network: Node.js was born to be distributed.

Unlike in other web platforms, scalability is a topic that gets explored rather quickly in Node.js while developing an application. This is often because of the single-threaded nature of Node.js, which is incapable of exploiting all the resources of a multi-core machine. But this is just one side of the coin. In reality, there are more profound reasons for talking about...