Scaling Applications Using Containers (I)

In this section, we’ll demonstrate how using containers and container orchestration platforms, such as Kubernetes, can help us write simpler Node.js applications that can delegate most of the scaling concerns like load balancing, elastic scaling, and high availability to the underlying container platform.

Containers and container orchestration platforms constitute a quite broad topic, largely outside the scope here. For this reason, here, we aim to provide only some basic examples to get started with this technology using Node.js. Ultimately, our goal is to encourage the exploration of new modern patterns in order to run and scale Node.js applications.

What’s a container

A container, specifically a Linux container, as standardized by the Open Container Initiative (OCI), is defined as “a standard unit of software that packages up code and all its dependencies so the application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another.”

In other words, by using containers, we can seamlessly package ...