Scaling Your Node.JS API Like a Boss (Part One)

It’s one thing to create a sample RESTful API using Node.js (maybe utilizing the cluster module to distribute the load), but it’s quite another to horizontally scale your architecture to hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections while trying to ensure redundancy and high availability. Knowing how to scale is important, but more important than that is knowing when to scale.

In this two-part tutorial, I will explore what it takes to create a real-life, scalable, highly available, and highly responsive Node.js application. Volkan will also explain how to store the application state in its own cluster and why it matters.

While doing that, I will outline how to choose the container architecture for your (virtual) machines, how you can roll out updates to service without disrupting the users, and how you fail gracefully when things on a node go haywire.

I will also also cover tracking down memory leaks and coming up with short-term (i.e., restarting your nodes when they become too beefy) and long-term (i.e., actually spotting where the leaks are and fixing them) solutions to address them.

When you dive deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole, you soon realize that scalability is a tough job that requires careful planning and consideration. The bottom line is that designing any system to scale is a never-ending adventure, and there is no limit on how deep you can dive.