In this chapter, we learned how to design Node.js architectures that scale both in capacity and complexity. We saw how scaling an application is not only about handling more traffic or reducing the response time, but it's also a practice to apply when we want better availability and tolerance to failures. We saw how these properties often are on the same wavelength and we understood that scaling early is not a bad practice, especially in Node.js, which allows us to do it easily and with few resources.
The scale cube taught us that applications can be scaled across three dimensions. We dived into the two most important of them, the X and Y axes, allowing us to discover two essential architectural patterns, namely, load balancing and microservices. We should know by now how to start multiple instances of the same Node.js application, how to distribute the traffic across them, and how to exploit this setup for other purposes such as fail tolerance and zero-downtime restarts. We also...