Node.js had an extraordinary year so far: npm already hit 4 million users and processes a billion downloads a week, while major enterprises adopt the language as the main production framework day by day.
The latest example of Node.js ruling the world is the fact that NASA uses it “to build the present and future systems supporting spaceship operations and development.” – according to the recent tweets of Collin Estes – Director of Software Technologies of the Space Agency.
Fortunately, the Node Foundation’s “Enterprise conversations” project lets us peek into the life of the greatest enterprises and their use cases as well.
This article summarizes how GoDaddy, Netflix, and Capital One uses Node.js in 2016.
GoDaddy ditched .NET to work with Node.js
Charlie Robbins is the Director of Engineering for the UX platform at GoDaddy. He is one of the longest-term users of the technology, since he started to use it shortly after watching Ryan Dahl’s legendary Node.js presentation at JSConf in December 2009 and was one of the founders of Nodejitsu.
His team at GoDaddy uses Node.js for both front-end and back-end projects, and they recently rolled out their global site rebrand in one hour thanks to the help of Node.js.
Before that, the company primarily used .NET and was transitioning to Java. They figured out that despite the fact that Microsoft does a great job supporting .NET developers and they’ve made .NET open source, it doesn’t have a vibrant community of module publishers and they had to rely too much on what Microsoft released.
“The typical .NET scenario is that you wait for Microsoft to come out with something that you can use to do a certain task. You become really good at using that, but the search process for what’s good and what’s bad, it’s just not a skill that you develop.”
Because of this, the company had to develop a new skill: to go out and find all the other parts of the stack. As opposed to other enterprise technologies like .NET where most of the functionality was included in the standard library, they had to become experts in evaluating modules.
GoDaddy started to use Node for the front-end and then ended up using it more in the back-end as well. The same .NET engineers who were writing the back-end code were writing the JavaScript front-end code. The majority of engineers are full stack now.
The most exciting things for Charlie about Node.js are being handled mainly by the working groups.
“I’m very excited about the tracing working group and the things that are going to come out of that to build an open source instrumentation system of eco-tooling.”
Other exciting things for him are the diagnostics working group (previously: inclusivity) and the Node.js Live events – particularly Node.js communities in countries where English is not used. Places like China, for example, where most of the engineers are still primarily speaking Chinese, and there’s a not a lot of crossovers.
“I’m excited to see those barriers start to come down and as those events get to run.”
As of talking about GoDaddy and Node: they have just released the project that they’ve been working on pretty extensively with Cassandra. It was an eight-month long process, and you can read the full story of “Taming Cassandra in Node.js” at the GoDaddy engineering blog.
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Netflix scales horizontally thanks to its Node container layer
The next participants in Node Foundations enterprise conversation series are Kim Trott, the director of UI Platform Engineering and Yunong Xiao, Platform Architect from Netflix.
Kim’s been at Netflix for nine years – she just arrived before the company launched its first streaming service. It was the era when you could only watch Netflix with Windows Media Player, and the full catalog consisted only 50 titles.
“I’ve seen the evolution of Netflix going from DVD and streaming to now being our own content producer.“
Yunong Xiao, who’s well known for being the maintainer of restify arrived two years ago, and just missed the party the company held for reaching 15 million users – but since they are fastly approaching their 100 millionth subscribers, he’ll have a chance to celebrate soon. Yunong previously worked at Joyent on Node.js and distributed systems, and at AWS as well. His role at Netflix is to have Node up and running in scale and making sure it’s performing well.
Kim manages the UI platform team within the UI engineering part of the organization. Their role is to help all the teams building the Netflix application by making them more productive and efficient. This job can cover a wide range of tasks: it could be building libraries that are shared across all of the teams that make it easier to do data access or client side logging, and building things that make easier to run Node applications in production for UI focused teams.
Kim provided us a brief update on how the containerization of the edge services have been going at Netflix – since she talked about it on Node Interactive in last years December.
When any device or client tries to access Netflix, they have to use something what’s called edge services, which is a set of endpoint scripts – a monolithic JVM based system, which lets them mutate and access data. It’s been working really well, but since it’s a monolith, Netflix met some vertical scaling concerns. It was a great opportunity to leverage Node and Docker to be able to scale horizontally all of this data access scripts out.
“Since I’ve spoken at Node Interactive we’ve made a lot of progress on the project, and we’re actually about to run a full system test where we put real production traffic through the new Node container layer to prove out the whole stack and flush out any problems around scaling or memory, so that’s really exciting.”
How Node.js affected developer productivity at Netflix?
The developer productivity comes from breaking down the monolith into smaller, much more manageable pieces – and from being able to run them on local machines and do the containerization.
We can effectively guarantee that what you’re running locally will very closely mirror what you run in production and that’s really beneficial – told Kim.
“Because of the way Node works we can attach debuggers, and set breakpoint steps through the code. If you wanted to debug these groovy scripts in the past, you would make some code changes upload it to the edge layer, run it, see if it breaks, make some more changes, upload it again, and so on..”
It saves us tens of minutes to test, but the real testament to this project is: all of our engineers who are working on the clients are asking: when do we get to use this instead of the current stack? – told Yunong.
The future of Node at Netflix
Over the next few months, the engineering team will move past building out the previously mentioned stack and start working on tooling and performance related problems. Finding better tools for post-mortem debugging is something that they’re absolutely passionate about.
They are also planning to be involved in the working groups and help contribute back to the community and so that they can build a better tool that everyone can leverage.
“One of the reasons why Node is so popular is the fact that it’s got a really solid suite of tools just to debug, so that’s something that we’re actually working contributing on.”
Node.js brings joy for developers at Capital One
Azat Mardan is a technology fellow at Capital One and an expert on Node.js and JavaScript. He’s also the author of the Webapplog.com, and you’ve probably read one of his most popular book: Practical Node.js.
“Most people think of Capital One as a bank and not as a technology company, which it is. At Capital One, and especially this Technology Fellowship program, we bring innovation, so we have really interesting people on my team: Jim Jagielski and Mitch Pirtle. One founded Apache Software Foundation and the other, Joomla!, so I’m just honored to be on this team.”
Azats goal is to bring Node.js to Capital One and to teach Node.js courses internally, as well as to write for the blog, and provide architectural advice. The company has over 5,000 engineers and several teams who started using Node.js at different times.
Capital One uses Node.js for:
- Hygieia, which is an open-source dashboard for DevOps. It started in 2013 and was announced last year at OSCON, and it has about 900 GitHub stars right now. They’re using Node.js for the frontend and for the build too.
- Building the orchestration layer. They have three versions of the Enterprise API, and it’s mostly built with Java, but it’s not convenient to use on the front end.
Capital One uses Angular mostly, but they have a little bit of React as well. In this case, the front-facing single page applications need something to massage and format the data – basically to make multiple codes to the different APIs. Node.js works really great for them for building this orchestration layer.
“It’s a brilliant technology for that piece of the stack because it allows us to use the same knowledge from the front end, to reuse some of the modules, to use the same developers. I think that’s the most widespread use case at Capital One, in terms of Node.js.”
The effect of Node.js on the company
Node.js allows much more transferable skill-sets between the front end and some of the back-end team, and it allows them to be a little bit more integrated.
“When I’m working with the team, and whether it’s Java or C# developers, they’re doubling a little bit on front ends; so they’re not experts but once they switch to the stack where Node.js is used in the back end, they’re more productive because they don’t have that switch of context. I see this pure joy that it brings to them during development because JavaScript it just a fun language that they can use.”
From the business perspective: the teams can reuse some of the modules and templates for example, and some of the libraries as well. It’s great from both the developers and from the managerial perspective.
Also, Node has a noticeable effect on the positions and responsibilities of the engineers as well.
Big companies like Capital One will definitely need pure back-end engineers for some of the projects in the future, but more and more teams employ ninjas who can do front-end, back-end, and a little bit of DevOps too – so the teams are becoming smaller.
Instead of two teams, one is a pure back end, and one is a pure front end – consisting seven people overall – a ninja team of five can do both.
“That removes a lot of overhead in communication because now you have fewer people, so you need fewer meetings, and you actually can focus more on the work, instead of just wasting your time.”
The future of Node.js
Node.js has the potential to be the go-to-framework for both startups and big companies, which is a really unique phenomenon – according to Azat.
“I’m excited about this year, actually. I think this year is when Node.js has gone mainstream.”
The Node.js Interactive in December has shown that major companies are supporting Node.js now. IBM said that Node.js and Java are the two languages for the APIs they would be focusing on, so the mainstream adoption of the language is coming, unlike what we’ve seen with Ruby – he told.
“I’m excited about Node.js in general, I see more demand for courses, for books, for different topics, and I think having this huge number of front-end JavaScript developers is just a tremendous advantage in Node.js.”
Start learning Node!
As you can see, adopting Node.js in an enterprise environment has tremendous benefits. It makes the developers happier and increases the productivity of the engineering teams.
If you’d like to start learning it I suggest to check out our Node Hero tutorial series.
Share your thoughts in the comments.
