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Muhammad Ovi
Muhammad Ovi

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at muhammadovi.com

Why NodeJS for Microservices?

Why use Node.js for Microservices?


Node.js is gaining popularity because of its remarkable features,

Handling multiple I/O (input/output) requests in a non-blocking way (event-driven non-blocking I/O), which helps in performance enhancement and scalability.

What is a microservice architecture?


“The microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services,

each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API.”
  —   Martin Fowler

Microservices refer to the software design pattern, to disintegrate big apps into a collection of smaller and simpler apps.

Individually, the apps could be testable, maintainable, as well as deployable.

Besides, they’re loosely coupled and organized around particular business aptitudes, thus it could be considered a business-oriented way of software development.

Okay so, back to the question:

Why should we use Node.js for Microservices?


Node.js is a very well-suited candidate for microservices.

Netflix, LinkedIn, PayPal, and many big brands have switched to Node.js to reap its benefits for their systems.

  • Netflix 🚀: Switching from Java to Node.Js has helped Netflix to improve its application performance to a great extent. The switch has also reduced its startup time by 70% (from 40 minutes to 1 minute).

  • LinkedIn 🚀: Moving from Ruby on Rails to Node.Js has helped them to improve the performance and efficiency of the application by 20 times, thereby reducing the infrastructure cost by 90% for serving the same traffic.

  • PayPal 🚀: Moving from Java to Node.Js has helped them to reduce the infrastructure cost by 50% to scale the same load. Their lines of code were also reduced by 1/3rd, which ultimately reduced the code maintenance effort.

Developing microservices with Node.js has become a standard today as it is easy to set up and also helps in reducing the development time. It has a lower memory footprint and better performance than Java/C# that helps in cost optimization.

Conclusion


JavaScript might be the most misunderstood language in the world but developers enjoy working with Node.js and microservices because of ease of development, hassle-free scaling, and cost control under high traffic instances.

Don’t hesitate to pick up Node.js for your next microservice, innovative organizations already utilize this tactical Node.js and microservices combination to achieve augmented productivity and high performance while lowering costs.


That's all folks! Hope you found this helpful, do not forget to add your email to the mailing list on my website 😉

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Harsh Makwana