The aim behind most of the software projects is to provide solution to a problem. However, during the process of developing a software and while implementing a solution for a problem, another problem arises, and it continues without the IT team not being able to cope up with it.

Whenever a new feature gets added to the existing application, it affects the other functionality or flow within the software. So, a single work of adding a feature will lead to a plethora of work behind the scenes. Scaling gets harder and time consuming with resources sometimes losing patience. Deployment becomes a daunting work for the resources, with millions of lines of codes waiting to get pushed into the production every time. While this is the case of the software, the management will encounter a great challenge while co-coordinating with the team of resources and the Client, without conflicting one another.

Microservices comes to the rescue

To solve these problems, innovative enterprises turned towards a new type of architecture called Microservices.
In micro-service based architecture, the entire software can be developed from multiple smaller pieces. These smaller pieces will be developed separately and then joined together to work as a whole.

In addition, Developers will have the free reign to use any technology or language. They will not be restricted to a particular technology and they can conduct a range of experiments.
If everything falls in place, Microservices will be a piece of cake that can be rewritten by a small team, in just a two weeks’ time.

If the quality or the performance is not up to the standard, then, it will not take long for them to replace a service. This way the risk is reduced to a large extent during development, along with the cost associated with the operations and the infrastructure. So, enterprises do achieve better performance at as lesser cost.
Now, what makes NodeJS the best option that gets finely blended with the Microservices. Let’s read now.

NodeJS and Microservices is a match made in heaven

During the past years, NodeJS saw a rising popularity for itself among Start-ups and Enterprises, who particularly embraced Microservices. What is so appealing about NodeJS?
While some of the Start-ups and Enterprises expressed that NodeJS increased the productivity of their IT teams by 3x, some others said the Applications developed using NodeJS became lightening fast or simply because their Developers are happy to use NodeJS for development.
All these claims are definitely true and we shall now know the reasons thoroughly.

Productivity: The package manager of NodeJS npm has an incredible set of modules that can be used right away.

This itself saves a lot of development time. Also NodeJS, having written using JavaScript, the front end Developers can easily understand what is happening and make the amendments accordingly. As the Developers use the same language across the stack and the same modules in the front end as well as the back end, they save a lot on time.

Performance: NodeJS, with its non-blocking event-driven I/O Model, becomes capable of developing the best solutions with high performance and speed. When combined with micro service based application, the application becomes capable for handling any amount of data with quick load times. By making the best use of microservices and NodeJS, it is possible to handle the same load with only 10 percent of the hardware, according to GoDaddy’s Senior Software Engineer, Stephen Commisso.

Developers’ Darling:

NodeJS is continuously winning the hearts of many Developers from across the world, with 3.5 million Users and still growing with an annual growth rate of 100 percent, according to Node Foundation. Also, its module system, npm is much more popular and is seeing a significant growth, much faster than the package managers for other languages that are widely used in the enterprise environment. Also, we shouldn’t miss noticing that NodeJS is becoming popular among the next generation Developers, who are mostly reluctant to work on statically typed languages like C# or Java.

PayPal got rid of its Monolithic Application

At PayPal, the migration from a monolithic Java Stack to a Microservices based Node environment, started in the year 2013 and they began this with a prototype project. Experiencing a good performance of Node on their prototype platform, PayPal decided on trying the same out on the platform of their account overview page, a page that gets the most amount of web traffic. While doing so, they kept the Java application as a full back up option, in case something went wrong.

The results of the migration were astonishing for the PayPal IT team. Their NodeJS Application was developed within half the duration, with only a half of the engineering resources, with 33 percent fewer code lines and 40 percent fewer files. With regard to the performance, NodeJS exceeded their expectations. A single core Node Application was capable of handling double rps as the five core Java Application. The load time decreased by 35% and the pages were served 200 ms faster. From this point onward, there was no looking back for PayPal at all.

Netflix reduced its 40 minutes Start-up time with NodeJS and Microservices

In 2013, Netflix ran a huge monolithic application with 40 minutes long startup times and a slow build, according to Kim Trott, Director of UI platform engineering. This development led them nowhere in terms of production and innovation.
They then decided on moving their website into a single page application and choose a common language to write the same code, keeping the standard philosophy of NodeJS in mind, write once and then run everywhere.
Post this, they experienced increased productivity among Developers, as they were able to break down their monolithic application into smaller and manageable pieces using containerization to run code on local machines. Being able to run the code locally, the developers were able to closely observe what happened when they ran the code in production.

Godaddy’s switchover to NodeJS from .Net

According to Stephen Commisso, Senior Developer at GoDaddy, GoDaddy saw that .Net doesn’t have a supporting community of module publishers, like NodeJS. They had to rely on Microsoft for releases. They realized that this doesn’t work at all for an agile company and they decided on a migration to NodeJS and began prototyping NodeJS Applications in 2013.
Post that, they were able to experience agility by implementing a continuous integration pipeline. They owe this to Microservices, as they are able to deploy into production in less than a minute now, according to Shaheeda Nizar, GoDaddy’s Senior Director. of Openstack Engineering . Also, since their application is built on a ‘shared-nothing’ architecture, the deployment is a piece of cake for them now.

Conclusion

Highly innovative enterprises have now started realizing that NodeJS and Microservices are the best combination for increasing Developers’ productivity, reducing costs, increasing speed and improving the load time of the applications and to achieve agility in the entire development process.