Introduction to AWS

Overview

Node has been rather a game changer in the web application world. One of the reasons for this is the lightweight hardware specifications that are needed to run a Node web server. Traditionally, web server engines, such as Apache or Microsoft’s IISInternet Information Services web server, needed some pretty beefy servers in order to accommodate thousands of HTTP requests per second.

Node, as we have discussed, uses a single-threaded architecture, and each instruction that needs to wait for any reason is put onto a queue for processing at a later time. This means that the server is only running a single thread of execution at any particular time and, therefore, can handle a large number of simultaneous requests with a surprisingly small amount of CPU or RAM.

In the modern age of cloud computing, this means that many more Node web servers can be run on a single piece of physical hardware compared to other traditional web servers.

Most cloud services, including Azure, Google, and Amazon, have taken this concept a step further and now offer the ability to run code without the need for a server at all. Our code is provided with a runtime environment that has all of the dependencies we may need. If we take Node as an example, as long as we have the basic Node modules available at runtime, setting up some code to handle a single web request requires just a few lines of code.

Running code to handle requests within these environments is known as serverless architecture. We do not have to worry about maintaining a server to handle a particular request; the cloud service provider will handle all of this for us.