Long ago in the early days of the Internet, pointing your browser at a URL meant your machine would start up a conversation with one server, and only one—the one connected with that URL. That may still happen if you visit a personal blog, but today all of the major websites and most of the small ones are really constellations of servers, sometimes dozens, sometimes hundreds, and sometimes even thousands.

Node.js has always been a popular foundation for enabling this leap into the future. Perhaps it’s because Node.js exploded in popularity around the same time as the microservice paradigm. Perhaps it’s because Node.js fits well in Docker containers. Perhaps it’s just because JavaScript is everywhere. Now when we go to a website, our packets travel to Node.js stacks, triggering more calls to more Node.js servers, each delivering a portion of the data that fills our screens.

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