Can you believe that Node.js is already 15 years old?
Powering over 6.3 million websites, countless APIs, and used by 98% of the Fortune 500, Node.js is the most used web development tool today. It is an excellent choice for building high-performance applications at speed, however, we know from experience that it takes significant expertise to scale Node.js in enterprise environments.
Through listening to our open-source community and private preview customers, we've heard the horror stories– applications crashing, deployments gone wrong, and cloud bills skyrocketing. We’re on a mission to solve these problems.
That’s why we’re launching the Platformatic Command Center – the only unified platform tackling the challenges related to operating, managing and scaling Node.js applications head-on. Book a demo, or read on to learn how we’re solving them.
Self-managing Node.js is complex and expensive
Over the years, my co-founder Matteo Collina and I have worked with dozens of engineering teams at Fortune 500 companies to architect their most important Node.js applications. If you’ve built Node.js applications before, you’ve probably run Matteo’s code. His open-source libraries like Fastify and Pino are downloaded over 40M times each month, and his contributions to Node.js have improved the project for everyone. As part of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee, he has a front row seat to the Node community and its evolving needs.
Between wrangling Kubernetes pods, debugging distributed systems, and optimizing the event loop, we’ve solved a lot of thorny Node.js issues throughout our careers. But not everyone has the resources, time, or our expertise to do this themselves.
The Platformatic Command Center is the platform we wish we had many years ago. It helps enterprise teams finally address these issues:
Deploying fast often means breaking things: Fast deployments often come at the cost of instability. The tighter the turnaround, the higher the risk of errors. Coordinating numerous Node microservices for frequent deployments can be a significant challenge, especially for geographically dispersed teams. Every modification, update, or addition to a microservice, however minor, can ripple through the system, impacting stability, performance, and reliability. Without clear, real-time visibility into the deployment process, teams struggle to identify issues, leading to costly service disruptions and sleepless nights for on-call teams.
Fragmented view of application health: Standard metrics for Node applications often lack the context needed for effective troubleshooting. Monitoring Node.js performance requires cobbling together insights from multiple tools and custom dashboards, juggling metrics like CPU usage, memory consumption, and latency. This fragmented view makes it difficult to pinpoint the root cause of slowdowns and unresponsive applications. Imagine a platform with numerous microservices; a fragmented view might reveal high CPU usage, but without context, identifying the culprit remains a guessing game. This hinders timely troubleshooting, leading to persistent performance bottlenecks that cost companies millions in lost revenue.
Resource management decisions often mean choosing between overspending or underperforming: Scaling Node.js applications in a dynamic environment with fluctuating traffic demands requires careful resource allocation. Take for example the Node.js event loop– the heart of asynchronous processing. A poorly managed event loop can lead to slowdowns. Traditional approaches often rely on static resource provisioning, leading to inefficient cloud resource utilization. This lack of dynamic resource scaling can result in increased costs and potential performance limitations that can negatively impact user experience. Moreover, we see organizations with far too many preview environments, causing provisioning sprawl, inconsistent configurations and resource overload.
Across our work with Node over the last decade, we realized one crucial fact: existing solutions simply don't address all these challenges at once. Node's open-source nature meant early adopters, fueled by a thriving developer community, defined best practices – often geared towards personal projects. As Node's popularity surged within enterprises, these practices, not designed for enterprise environments, were adopted wholesale. This has led to tangled codebases over time.
That's why we're sharing our Node.js expertise – to make delivering Node.js applications at scale simple, even for those with hundreds of legacy microservices.
The Command Center is an intuitive, unified platform that seamlessly integrates with your existing infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines, allowing you to:
- Intelligently autoscale: Modern web applications experience dynamic traffic surges. Manual resource adjustments for each application are inefficient. The Command Center offers intelligent autoscaling that leverages real-time application data. This goes beyond basic scaling approaches, like those in Kubernetes, which rely on generic cluster-level metrics like CPU or memory usage. While Kubernetes might scale up an entire pod due to high CPU or shut down another due to low memory, this is highly inefficient due to the unique characteristics of Node.js. The Command Center drills down deeper, analyzing Node-specific metrics to pinpoint the exact source of strain. This allows optimal utilization without wasting resources.
Optimize event loop utilization: The Command Center doesn't just tell you how busy the event loop is – it helps you keep it running smoothly. Real-time CPU usage insights help you identify potential bottlenecks before they cause slowdowns. By pinpointing applications with high CPU consumption, you can optimize your application and ensure the event loop remains efficient in handling requests.
A unified Node dashboard for enterprise teams
Solving performance problems is important, but what about the human challenges associated with collaborating on Node.js applications across multiple teams? We’ve added some workflows that make it simple for teams to debug and monitor hundreds of Node.js applications together:
One dashboard for centralized performance data and metrics: A single, intuitive dashboard gives teams a real-time overview of all their Node.js applications and services so they can see resource utilization, deployment statuses, and key metrics like CPU usage, memory consumption, and latency in one place. By centralizing all application data and activity in one place, the Command Center provides a comprehensive audit trail. This facilitates compliance efforts and helps trace actions for troubleshooting purposes to minimize user impact.
- Proactively manage risks to avoid downtime: Built-in risk detection identifies potential issues before they break applications, letting you move fast with confidence. With impact analysis, teams can understand the potential consequences of changes before they are implemented. And for unforeseen issues, rollback functionality ensures a swift return to a previous stable state, minimizing disruption.
Ship modern Node.js applications faster
The Platformatic Command Center isn't just a management tool – it's a way to bring Node.js best practices into your team’s workflows and infrastructure with minimal effort. It empowers your development teams to untangle themselves from complex scaling issues and focus on what truly matters: building incredible Node.js applications, faster than ever before. Our users have been loving the speed and agility that Platformatic delivers:
“The use of Platformatic was pivotal for the delivery of Spendesk’s Public API in under 6 months. The Platform has simplified our development process and helped us ship quickly and iteratively as we continue to expand our features and accelerate our time-to-market.” Marco Bassi, Group Engineering Manager - Spendesk Platform, Spendesk.
To discover how the Command Center can help you reduce time to market, minimize downtime, and reduce cloud spend, book a demo now.
