Netflix & # 8211; 1 in 10 typical businesses use NodeJS effectively

NodeJS had a breakthrough year when npm owned 4 million users and 1 billion downloads a week, at the same time big businesses began to see the language as a major production framework.

A recent example of NodeJS dominate the world is the Director of Software Technologies of the Space Agency announced on Twitter that NASA is using NodeJS "to build the operation and development apparatus supporting systems." now and future"

Below is an analysis of how Netflix – a popular US video streaming service, similar to NASA when successfully using the new generation language NodeJS.

Thanks to Node container layer, Netflix has scaled horizontally

Kim Trott – Director of UI Platform Engineering worked at Netflix for 9 years. The moment she arrived only before the company launched its first streaming service – a period when you could only watch Netflix with Windows Media Player and full catalogs with only 50 titles.

“I have witnessed the transformation of Netflix from DVD and streaming to the current producer content”

Yunong Xiao – Netflix's Platform Architect – came to the company two years ago, known for the restify module maintenance role of NodeJS. His role at Netflix is ​​to ensure the Node runs well in scale. Meanwhile, Kim manages the UI platform group in the organization's UI engineering section. The role of Kim Trott and Yunong Xiao is to help all teams build Netflix applications with a variety of tasks: building shared libraries among teams for data access or client side logging, building tools to help teams that are focusing on UI can run Node applications in production more easily.

Kim updates brief information about how Netflix is ​​carrying out containerization of edge services.

When any device or customer tries to reach Netflix, they must use edge services – a set of endpoint scripts, a monolithic JVM-based system, that allows data conversion and access. Although it is doing quite well, but because it is monolith, Netflix has encountered some concerns about vertical expansion. This is a good opportunity to make the most of Node and Docker to be able to scale out horizontally all scripts approaching this data.

“… We made many improvements in the project and actually ran a full system test by setting real traffic production through the new layer container node to prove the entire stack and remove all issues around scaling or memory. Great"

How does NodeJS affect Netflix dev productivity?

Productivity comes from breaking monolith into smaller parts, to be manageable, from the ability to run on local machines and implement containerization.

"We make sure that what you are running internally reflects what you are running in production and how it really works" – Kim Trott

“Thanks to Node 's operation, we can attack debuggers and set breakpoints via code. If you want to debug these interesting scripts in the past, you'll have to change some lines of code to upload it to egde layer, run it, see how it breaks down, make some more changes, upload it again and keep it such…"

"Node saves 10 minutes to test, but the real" will "for this project is: all Netflix engineers working with customers ask: when do we start using it? instead of the current stack? ”- Yunong

The future of Node at Netflix

In the next few months, the engineering team will finish the stack already mentioned and start working with tooling as well as performance issues. Finding better tools to debug old things is really something the engineering team is very interested in.

Team also plans to work with existing groups, supporting the community in reverse so that they can build a better tool.

"One of the reasons why Node is so famous is because it is really a set of powerful tools, not only for debugging but also something that we can add more."

Source: ITZone via IDE Academy via RisingStack

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