Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, it implements the reactor pattern, a non-blocking, event-driven I/O paradigm.

You definitely don’t want to use Node.js for CPU-intensive operations, using it for heavy computation will annul nearly all of its advantages. Node.js really shines in building fast, scalable network applications, as it’s capable of handling a huge number of simultaneous connections with high throughput.

One way to improve the throughput of a web application is to scale it, instantiate it multiple times balancing the incoming connection between the multiple instances, so this first article will be about how to horizontally scale a Node.js application, on multiple cores or on multiple machines.

When you scale up, you have to be careful about different aspects of your application, from the state to the authentication, so the second article will cover some** things you must consider** when scaling up a Node.js application.

Over the mandatories ones, there are some good practices you can addressthat will be covered in the third article, like splitting api and worker processes, the adoption of priority queues, the management of periodic jobs like cron processes, that are not intended to run N times when you scale up to N processes/machines.

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