8 Top Companies That Rely on Node.js

Alongside the rising popularity of JavaScript , Node.js has got its own way of attracting many companies worldwide and of becoming a go-to technology for many developers and technology experts. This JavaScript technology helped many popular companies to build various fully-functional applications like social media apps, messengers, real-time tracking apps, online games, and collaboration tools. After its launch in 2009, it removes the need for different languages by allowing a single language application development. Though Node.js is mainly used to create web applications in real-time, the mobile app development is also possible, thanks to whole Node.js ecosystem and particularly due to its largest package manager ecosystem in the world– NPM.

What is Node.js?

Node.js is an application runtime environment that enables using JavaScript for building server-side applications that have access to the operating system, file system, and everything else to be fully-functional. Among other server-side technologies, Node stands out with its speed, and intensive data exchange․

Thanks to its unique I/O model, it excels in many scalable and real-time situations demanded from the servers.  It’s lightweight, efficient, and its ability to use JavaScript on both frontend and backend opens new ways for development. That’s why it is not surprising that lots of major and popular industry leaders chose to rely on Node.js. Each of those companies has a unique and interesting story about Node.js implementation. Below you can find some of those stories telling why those IT giants picked up Node from all the powerful server-side technologies and what were the results after writing their server-side in JavaScript.

#1 Netflix

Netflix, the world's leading Internet television network with over 117 million users, is one of those top companies that trusted his servers to Node.js. It uses copious amounts of A/B testing to provide a rich experience for the users of its high-capacity data-driven platform. Great numbers of unique packages per release cycle create conditional dependencies and app scalability glitches, this is the reason why the company chose to leverage a lightweight and fast platform like Node.js that reduced the startup time by 70%. During his talk at Nodeconf EU 2014, Alex Liu, a software developer at Nexflix, talked about their experimentations and what they got as a result in details.

#2 Walmart

Walmart is the world’s largest retailer with approximately the $481.32 billion global net sales in 2017. The company has chosen to work with Node.js despite the risk that it was a really young technology. Walmart re-developed its mobile app to provide more advanced features on the client side. The development team especially appreciated the Node.js famous asynchronous I/O and its single-threaded event loop models that can efficiently handle concurrent requests. Alexander Grigoryan, Sr Director of Software Engineering at Walmart Group, at Nodevember 2016 shared details about how the company migrated to React and Node.js in less than a year. You can watch the talk here.

#3 Uber

To conquer the considerable challenge of ensuring a reliably excellent experience for its customers and drivers at a quickly-growing scale, Uber has built its massive matching system on Node.js. The three core sides of Node.js that made it a good fit for Uber were asynchronous I/O requests handling, quick iterations and the active open source community. Kris Kowal, a Software Engineer at Uber, told also that Node.js is particularly well-suited to writing systems that have all their state in memory as they do not have to externalize the concerns of a distributed system, thus resulting in that the systems can be more available, and they can respond more quickly to requests by eliminating the reading/writing and the serialization of state into a database. You can read the detailed case study of Uber using Node.js here.

#4 Paypal

PayPal, one of the largest fintech leaders, has also trusted their back-end development to Node.js. Originally Paypal shifted from Java to JavaScript by experimenting and developing two Java and Node.js applications at the same time. After two apps with the same functionalities were ready, they were tested and compared and here what the engineers learnt: Node.js app was built almost twice as fast with fewer people, there were written in 33% fewer lines of code while developing in Node, and the app was constructed with 40% fewer files. In his talk at Node.js Interactive 2015, Matt Edelman, NodeJS Infrastructure Manager at PayPal, is telling about how the company tried to adopt the language change, how much their developers loved this technology and what challenges there are when you decide to use Node.js implying that it is challenging to keep up with the active community of Node.js developers.

#5 LinkedIn

The world’s biggest professional social network, LinkedIn, too, shifted its server side code entirely to Node.js. They migrated from Ruby on Rails and the reasons for choosing Node are many. As Kiran Prasad, VP of Product at LinkedIn, stated in one of his interviews the first reason was the scale. Node is also really good at talking to other services like API and database. Now the LinkedIn mobile app is two to ten times faster and more lightweight. On top of that, the development was quite quick. Read the full interview here.

#6 Medium

Medium, one of the world’s largest online publishing platforms, too, uses Node.js for their web servers. Maybe Medium web app can seem just a simple web HTML page, there is much more technology behind it, alongside all the challenges that the company faces. Medium is a data-driven platform that evolves along the users and their behaviour. Node.js is particularly useful when it comes to running A/B tests to get a better comprehension of product changes and experiment with new ideas. Dan Papuis, former software developer at Medium, let us know that Medium trusted the technology in one of his articles here.

#7 eBay

Ebay, a multinational e-commerce company, has always been open to new technologies. With about 170 million active users, the company settled on Node.js for two prime reasons: they needed an application as real-time as possible to maintain live connections with the server and a solution that could orchestrate a huge number of eBay-specific services that display information on the page. Here is where Node.js appeared to be a perfect fit. Now the company is transitioning to full-featured stack on Node․ As Senthil Padmanabhan & Steven Luan mentioned in their Ebay tech blog post, speed and simplicity, performance, scalability, feeling of transparency and control, single-threading, handling I/O-bound operations, not-blocking I/O, are only a few factors to mention that company considered advantageous and efficient in Node.

#8 NASA

It might be surprising but NASA uses Node.js, too. Here, the technology is of much greater importance than in other applications because it saves lives, keeping astronauts safe during their dangerous space expeditions. After an accident in which one of the astronauts nearly died, NASA found out its data to be scattered on many locations. They decided to build own end-to-end data system and went with Node.js. NASA moved the data related to the EVA spacesuits to one cloud database in order to reduce the access times. The new system based on Node.js decreased the number of steps in the process for 300%. More detailed case study of Node.js implementation at NASA and how this JavaScript technology helps its astronauts keep safe and data accessible, you can find here.

Besides, all these above-mentioned industry leaders, there are many other big and small companies that chose to use Node.js in production. Among them you can find also Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Mozilla or Github. As this technology is developing more and more companies will, of course, try to take it up as it is fast, simple, performant, and completely effective. 

At Simply, we started using Node.js in 2012. From that time on, this unique and incredible JavaScript technology has our hearts. We have done a number of big and small projects in Node.js that stand out with their lightness, speed and great performance. All of them are shining like diamonds everywhere due to the technology we use, and, of course, the expert job of Simply JavaScript ninjas.