How are 10 Global Companies Using Node.js in Production?
Node.js is increasingly becoming a go-to technology for multiple companies across the globe. As Node.js emphasizes on concurrency, speed, and intensive data exchange along with employing push technology over web sockets, it has helped companies to build various applications such as social media apps, video and text chat engines, real-time tracking apps, online games and collaboration tools.
We have mentioned below some high-profile examples of companies using Node.js for building their primary application:
Netflix
Netflix is arguably the biggest streaming media and VOD provider in the world. It uses copious amounts of A/B testing to run its high-capacity data-driven platform and deliver a rich experience to over 104 million subscribers worldwide. With an array of packages considered every push cycle often lead to conditional dependency and scalability glitches. It was therefore important for the company to leverage a lightweight and fast platform like Node.js, which reduced the startup time by 70 percent.
The biggest social-networking platform dedicated to business and employment, Linkedin, also relies on Node.js’ as their trusted framework. Endorsing their trust, they effectively moved the mobile-app backend from Ruby on Rails to Node.js last year. However, the Node.js development environment was still premature, but the organization benefitted immensely from this move. The new app is extremely lightweight and is at least twice as fast as its predecessor.
Walmart
World’s largest retail chain, Walmart, is ambitiously plunging into the online commerce space. This endeavor of theirs to go online is being supported by Node.js which is their framework of choice. Walmart chose to go with the trend and take the risk of involving a fairly newer technology than going with the tried and tested frameworks. The organization offered its clients with newer, more sophisticated features by entirely re-engineering their mobile application. Node.js’ asynchronous I/O mechanism along with its single threaded event loop models can help Walmart handle concurrent requests.
Trello
Trello is touted as a revolutionary project management app that has found many takers across the world. It was important for them to choose an event-driven, non-blocking server with an ability to hold many open connections for the instant propagation of updates. Node.js was useful for building the single-page application. It facilitated the entire process and helped Trello move in the correct direction.
Uber
Uber is a famous platform that connects cab rides to customers in need of transportation services through its app. Their app has been engineered by utilizing several Node.js tools and programming languages. They constantly evolve their tech stack and have since its inception introduced many new technologies to improve business efficiency. However, Node.js is still a primary aspect of their company’s operations as it makes scaling up of resources a simplistic affair in order to accommodate rising demand for their services.
PayPal
The world-renowned online payments platform successfully transitioned their backend development from to Node.js. The development teams at the outset were divided into the ones who write browser-specific code and those who write app layer-specific code, however, the divide created quite a lot of misunderstandings. Full-stack developers came with their own set of shortcomings. Therefore, Node.js was an ideal solution as it helped to bring a cohesiveness with the same programming language prevailing in both browser and server level applications- JavaScript. It helped developers come together as a unified entity and work to resolve issues at both ends and effectively react to customer needs.
Medium
A renowned online publishing platform, Medium uses web services for its web servers. Though the web app might appear as a simple HTML page initially, a host of other technological elements has been incorporated for its functioning. Medium follows a data-driven approach and leverages A/B tests to get a comprehensive outlook on product changes and facilitates experimentation with newer ideas.
eBay
Ebay is the multinational e-commerce function that has always been receptive to adopt newer technologies. They were looking for a high-intensity real-time application to be able to maintain a huge number of live connections on the server. They also needed a solution that would help them orchestrate a huge number of E-bay-specific services that could display a lot of information on the page. Node.js came across as the most appropriate solution that could meet both their requirements effectively.
NASA
NASA uses this technology for its application that is of remarkable importance. Their application is focused on keeping lives of its astronauts safe during perilous space expeditions. This technological shift came to be when one of their astronauts nearly lost his/her life due to unreliable data hosted in several locations. NASA was presented with a challenge of moving all the data related to the EVA spacesuits to a single cloud database to dramatically reduce the access timelines. Adapting Node.js was the ideal choice as it efficaciously decreased the number of procedural steps from 28 to 7
Groupon
The popular virtual marketplace for online deals and coupons, Groupon has successful operations worldwide. They decided to rebuild their website layer on Node.js because the previous tech stack that they had been using was rendered obsolete and had become hard to maintain. Especially because subsequent acquisitions worldwide had made it difficult for them manage different stacks for each set-up. In the pursuit to unify their development across all their platforms, this project became one of the largest production deployments of Node.js of all time.
Node.js- The Way Forward
Node is continuously becoming a preferable technology for multiple companies. There are several other big names that include Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Mozilla and Github who have embraced Node.js as a part of their operations. More and more companies are using Node.js as it brings with itself innumerable advantages. Technology pundits claim that it is only a matter of time that Node.js takes over the market entirely and becomes the default go-to framework for many more big brands.
