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Nilesh Kadivar
Nilesh Kadivar

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How Netflix and Paypal did product transformation using Node.js?

Case Study

Netflix

Netflix is the best example who leveraged the benefit of Node.js by implementing it for production and they achieved the tremendous result-economically and in performance.

Netflix is one of the world’s largest online media streaming providers delivering almost 7 billion hours of videos to nearly 50 million customers in 60 countries per quarter.

Earlier Netflix was using Java on server side and javascript on frontend side so developer had to code twice, which required them to understand both the languages. They had to write everything twice for error handling, activity tracking and debugging.

Why Netflix Implemented the Node.js by Yunong Xiao, Principle Engineer, Netflix.

A primary reason to move to Node.js

  • Have a common language for both server-side and browser side.

  • Performance that Node.js offers. From a 40 minute + startup time they went to under a minute

  • Node has a lot of modules that are a mostly open source.

  • To build the single page application.

Future Goal for Netflix

Node.js support Non-blocking and can use for microservices like AWS Lambda to develop serverless architecture.The company is planning to use AWS Lambda to build rule-based self-managing infrastructure and replace inefficient processes to reduce the rate of errors and save valuable time.

Paypal

Paypal was one of the first company who was given a chance to use Node.js, to take the risk to make difference because at that time Node.js was not popular language.

First of all, they were using the Java on server side and javascript on the browser side. They first tried to develop the prototype using Node.js and same with java too. To develop the prototype using the java they assign a team of 5 developers and a team of 2 developers for using node.js.

Surprisingly, they got unbelievable result team of 2 developers caught the team of java developers in prototype development, That’s very fast. You can develop an application in half time using Node.js compare to Java.

Primary reasons to implement Node.js

A primary reason to implement the node.js in production was to handle the “100% Business Availability, even with Huge Load”.

“Around 1.5 billion dollars are being spent online in the US on a single day on Black Friday, each year.”
Paypal got the good result in performance which user can definitely notice:

35% decrease in the average response time for the same page. This
resulted in the pages being served 200ms faster — something users
will definitely notice.

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