Node.js: Reflections on Five Years in Production

Abstract:

This year marks Node.js' fifth year - half a decade of "riding the unicorn," as I've referred to it in the past. Joyent is not only the corporate steward of Node.js, but also one of its earliest adopters, giving me a totally unique perspective on its growth and role in modern applications over the past five years. We deployed Node.js-based services in production starting five years ago and have worked extensively with a number of other organizations running Node.js in production, such as Yahoo and ADP.

In this presentation, I'll take the audience through the Node.js odyssey thus far, touching on the victories as well as the challenges and battle scars earned along the way. I'll also discuss how our experiences using Node.js at Joyent have deeply informed our stewardship of the project. Five years later, Node.js is still growing, and it remains the right tool for so many of our jobs. I'll outline best practices for developing and deploying Node.js-based systems, and take a look at what the future holds for Node.js in production.

Speaker:

Bryan Cantrill is the CTO at Joyent, where he oversees worldwide development of the SmartOS and SmartDataCenter platforms, and the Node.js platform. Prior to joining Joyent, Bryan served as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he spent over a decade working on system software, from the guts of the kernel to client-code on the browser. In particular, he co-designed and implemented DTrace, a facility for dynamic instrumentation of production systems that won the Wall Street Journal's top Technology Innovation Award in 2006 and the USENIX Software Tools User Group Award in 2008. Bryan also co-founded the Fishworks group at Sun, where he designed and implemented the DTrace-based analytics facility for the Sun Storage 7000 series of appliances.

[For reference to his speaking style, here is a video of Bryan speaking at CloudBeat 2013]