Chapter 2. Installing and Virtualizing Node Servers

Recall the story from Chapter 1, Appreciating Node, about how Walmart ran all of its Black Friday mobile traffic through Node, which was deployed across the equivalent of 2 CPUs and 30 gigs of RAM. This demonstrates that Node processes I/O so efficiently that even Walmart-level traffic on Black Friday can be handled with only a few servers. This means that, for many people, running your Node application on a single server is all you'll ever need to do.

Nevertheless, it is often good to have several servers at your disposal, such as redundant servers to ensure failover recovery, a distinct database server, specialized media servers, one hosting a message queue, and so on. In keeping with the idea of separating concerns into many independent processes, Node-based applications are often composed of many lightweight servers spread across a data center, possibly even spread across several data centers.

In this chapter, we will look at the basics of setting up single Node servers concretely and virtually. The goal is to explore your options for mass producing servers in response to scaling needs and to see how you can connect these together. You will learn how to set up an HTTP/S server yourself as well as how to do tunneling and proxying with Node. We'll then look at a few popular cloud-hosting solutions and how to set up Node servers on those. We'll close with a discussion on Docker, an exciting new technology to create lightweight virtual services.