Big data applications have placed significant responsibility on developers of network applications to prepare for scale. Node has offered help in creating a network-friendly application development environment that can easily connect to other devices on a network, such as cloud services and, in particular, other Node servers.
In this chapter we learned some good strategies for scaling Node servers, from analyzing CPU usage to communicating across processes. With our new knowledge of message queues and UDP we can build networks of Node servers scaling horizontally, letting us handle more and more traffic by simply replicating existing nodes. Having investigated load balancing and proxying with Node, we can confidently add capacity to our applications. When matched with the cloud services provided by AWS and Facebook, we are able to scale our data stores and user account management with ease and at low cost.
As our applications grow we will need to maintain continuous awareness of how...