What is Node.js and Why You Should Use It For Enterprise Software?

It's hard to escape JavaScript's ubiquity in modern web development. While it has been offering great frameworks and libraries for creating interactive interfaces for years, it never had a backend platform that could compete with well-established alternatives – until Node.js. Node.js has since been embraced by startups and enterprises alike.

Development with Node.js has become the new standard for enterprise applications. As of today, organizations using Node.js in production include Walmart, NASA, Intel, and Twitter. Many others have rewritten their existing code to Node.js to boost developer productivity and improve application performance.

What Is Node.js and What Are Its Advantages?

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment that allows the infrastructure to build and run applications. It's a lightweight, scalable, and cross-platform way to execute code. It uses an event-driven I/O model, which makes it extremely efficient and enables scalable network applications.

Node.js excels at building real-time applications, Internet of Things systems, and microservices. It has gained traction faster than most other technologies and consistently ranks in lists of most in-demand developer skills.

The most important advantages of Node include:

• It makes it fast to build real-time, high-traffic applications such as chats or gaming platforms

• It enables JavaScript for both client-side and server-side development

• It increases development efficiency by bridging the gap between frontend and backend developers

• The npm package ecosystem gives developers a vast range of tools and modules, boosting productivity

• Code executes quickly thanks to the V8 engine

• Node is well-suited for microservices, which are a popular architectural pattern for enterprise applications

Why Use Node.js on an Enterprise Level?

Any programming language will give you reasons to choose it. 

The thing about Node.js is that it was built for applications at scale. Modern tooling and its embrace of forward-looking ways of developing complex applications make Node.js stand apart.

Performance and Scalability

Node.js is built upon Google Chrome's V8 engine – written in C++, built for multiple operating systems, and continuously updated with performance improvements and security patches. The use of JavaScript also means that transforming JSON data – the most common data interchange format on the web – is fast by default.

The single-threaded, event-driven architecture of Node.js allows it to handle multiple simultaneous connections efficiently. Most popular web platforms create an additional thread for each new request, consuming RAM for the entire duration of processing. Node, by contrast, operates on a single thread, making use of the event loop and callbacks for I/O operations and delegating tasks like database operations as early as possible. This allows it to handle hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections.

Node.js embraces app scalability from the outset, with powerful features such as the Cluster module enabling load balancing over multiple CPU cores. Tools like the PM2 process manager make it easier to monitor, optimize, and deploy Node applications.

What Is Node.js Used For in Enterprises?

Combining Node.js with a Microservices Pattern

Every project starts out small – or with an MVP release.

But as time passes, it grows: new features, new users, higher expectations. Without noticing, you may end up with a large project that your development team struggles to manage.

Soon, you will need to add new features while maintaining performance. As the system grows more complex, introducing changes becomes difficult.

This is a common problem in enterprise applications. Consider a marketing application serving three separate areas: email marketing, CMS, and reporting. One feature will be used far more than the other two. As the user base grows, more computing power needs to be added for the app to keep running. Ideally, you'd scale just the CMS part – but with monolithic apps (see Martin Fowler's Monolith), this approach is impossible. You're forced to scale the entire system.

Moreover, the app often becomes difficult to manage, deployment becomes painful, and teams grow too large to coordinate efficiently.

The answer is the microservices pattern.

According to Max Stoiber, an open-source developer and creator of styled-components:

A microservice is a single self-contained unit which, together with many others, makes up a large application. By splitting your app into small units, every part of it is independently deployable and scalable, can be written by different teams and in different programming languages, and can be tested individually.

That also means you can run separate outsourced and in-house teams in different countries, working independently on different parts of the same application.

Smaller, distributed teams are much easier to coordinate, and you don't need to deploy the entire codebase every time you want to change one part of the app.

Well-known enterprise companies have embraced the combination of Node.js and microservices for better performance, less code, and efficient deployment – PayPal, Netflix, and GoDaddy among them.

Building Cross-Functional Teams

In a cross-functional team, every member is responsible for the entire lifecycle of the app: writing code, testing, hosting, deployment, and maintenance. These teams are made up of experts across all relevant areas – front-end and backend developers, infrastructure engineers, and quality assurance specialists.

This approach is common in startup circles, but with the microservices mindset in place, it's also accessible to enterprises and should be encouraged for better agility, innovation, and smoother collaboration.

In reality, some parts of an app may require greater focus on the client side, while others require server-side focus. Full-stack developers who know JavaScript can cover both. Because Node.js is rooted in JavaScript, it bridges frontend and backend development – meaning developers can act as full-stack contributors without learning additional languages.

Node Package Manager for Enterprises

The Node Package Manager, npm, allows programmers to install, update, and use open-source software packages (modules), so they don't have to write common features from scratch.

For enterprises with privacy and security requirements, npm now supports private registries with access controls through GitHub Packages – part of GitHub/Microsoft's ownership of npm. This allows organizations to maintain a private package registry with advanced security features, controlling access to code and managing dependencies without routing everything through the public npm registry.

As the npm documentation explains:

Many enterprises have strict requirements that prevent them from using cloud-hosted products for critical parts of their infrastructure. This makes life inconvenient for developers who wish to take advantage of open-source code from the npm Registry, or who wish to use npm to share and reuse their own code with colleagues.

GitHub Packages addresses this by giving businesses access to a private registry with enterprise-grade security controls – identifying vulnerabilities, managing access, and supporting regulatory compliance requirements for organizations in fintech, medtech, and government sectors.

Cross-Platform Development

Platforms like Electron and NW.js let you build cross-platform desktop apps with Node.js.

This means you can reuse code from your web app in desktop versions for macOS, Windows, and Linux. The same team working on your web app can deliver a desktop application without needing to learn C#, Objective-C, or other languages required for native app development.

Developers also have access to the same tooling as front-end developers – such as Google Chrome Developer Tools – enabling them to debug and profile backend and desktop apps as efficiently as client-side code. The majority of Node developer tools are cross-platform, which means developers don't need a Mac to write a macOS app, or a Windows machine for Windows apps.

Monterail's Node.js Experience

Monterail used Go and Node.js microservices architecture for the Flink grocery delivery platform. When Flink needed to move from a monolith to a scalable microservices architecture – covering checkout, cart, inventory, payments, and order tracking – Monterail scaled the engineering team from 2 to 11 and built 6 separate applications. The result: a platform now serving 10 million customers across 60 cities in 4 countries, where adding a new warehouse no longer requires an engineer.

That outcome is a direct demonstration of what the microservices pattern enables in practice: independently deployable, independently scalable components that let a small team maintain and extend a high-traffic system.

If your enterprise is considering Node.js for a new application or needs help modernizing an existing architecture, Monterail's Node.js team can help.