The evolution of Node.js at Netflix

As platforms grow, so do their needs. However, the core infrastructure is often not designed to handle these new challenges as it was optimized for a relatively simple task. Netflix, a member of the OpenJS Foundation, had to overcome this challenge as it evolved from a massive web streaming service to a content production platform. The Senior Platform Engineer at Netflix spearheaded efforts to restructure the Netflix Node.js infrastructure to handle new functions while preserving the stability of the application.

What is Node.js?

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, back-end JavaScript runtime environment that runs on the V8 engine and executes JavaScript code outside a web browser. Node.js lets developers use JavaScript to write command-line tools and for server-side scripting — running scripts server-side to produce dynamic web page content before the page is sent to the user’s web browser. Consequently, Node.js represents a “JavaScript everywhere” paradigm, unifying web application development around a single programming language, rather than different languages for server-side and client-side scripts.

Netflix initially used Node.js to enable high-volume web streaming to over 182 million subscribers. Their three goals with this early infrastructure were to provide observability (metrics), debuggability (diagnostic tools), and availability (service registration). The result was the NodeQuark infrastructure. An application gateway authenticates and routes requests to the NodeQuark service, which then communicates with APIs and formats responses that are sent back to the client. With NodeQuark, Netflix also created a managed experience — teams could create custom API experiences for specific devices. This allows the Netflix app to run seamlessly on different devices.

In Addition To Streaming:

Netflix wanted to move beyond web streaming and into content production. This posed several challenges to the NodeQuark infrastructure and the development team. Web streaming requires relatively few applications but serves a huge user base. On the other hand, a content production platform houses a large number of applications that serve a limited userbase. Furthermore, a content production app must have multiple levels of security for employees, partners, and users. An additional issue is that development for content production is ideally fast-paced while platform releases are slow, iterative processes intended to ensure application stability. Grouping these two processes together seems difficult, but the alternative is to spend unnecessary time and effort building a completely separate infrastructure.
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Reference link: https://openjsf.org/blog/2020/09/24/from-streaming-to-studio-the-evolution-of-node-js-at-netflix/