7 NodeJS Production Practices for an Efficient Project

Developing a powerful project is the wish of every entrepreneur competing in the market. However, most of them fail to design their projects to gain traction upon their launch. 

Why is that? When developing a project, we often see the first few layers as the base and then move ahead in polishing and enhancing the features. This means perfection is added to the last layers of the project. This is where entrepreneurs go wrong. 

Enhancement and optimization should be a routine for every single phase of the project. If the core of the project remains unpolished, so will be the outcome. 

Therefore, while building your NodeJS project, you must hire Nodejs developers to gain added professionalism into each layer of your project. 

When you hire a developer, you ensure that they follow all coding practices from day one. Including: minimizing the usage of anonymous functions, utilizing heavy cache, not saving data locally on a particular server, logging wisely, fabricating an error handling strategy, detecting failure with CI tools, and much more. 

Below we present the top NodeJS practice for a market-intelligent product: 

• Monitoring:

At the initial level, monitoring refers to quickly identifying if something goes wrong at the production. When noting down your requirements, you must define the core set of metrics like healthy state of the CPU, server RAM, Node processor RAM, number of last-minute errors, number of process restart, average response time, etc. 

Once you check all these, you can add your desired list of features to the production. 

• Use SSL:

Your NodeJS project needs a good security layer to manage user data efficiently and maintain our brand reputation. Therefore, you must take all measures to integrate proper security functions into your application from the start. Make sure to integrate SSL into your app to add an extra security layer to it. 

It would help if you looked for NodeJS developers for hire to use a reverse proxy to read the SSL key. Once you do that, the world can efficiently communicate with your application through the reverse proxy of NodeJS. 

• Increase transparency with Smart logging:

Logs can quickly become just a warehouse for the debug statements or simply enablers of the dashboard, which displays the story of your application. 

To avoid this, you must plan your logging platform right from the start of your NodeJS application. You must strategize where and how logs are collected, analyzed and stored; this ensures your desired information can effectively be at your disposal. If this does not happen, you can end up with the black box, which is cumbersome to rectify. You will have to rewrite all logging statements to add up the additional information. 

The logging framework will impact not only the process but also your application. Therefore, it is crucial to accept and incorporate it. 

• Choose best practices for error management: 

The most time-taking and cumbersome task of developing a powerful NodeJS application is ensuring its environment is stable and error-free. The task is difficult due to the lack of proper strategy to counter the asynchronous flow for the error paths and the “one thread model” followed by the technology. 

It becomes essential for your team to optimize error management to the most. If you fail at error management, you will find errors vanishing without a trace, imperfect process caching if a user passes an invalid JSON. Even the stack trace information can be relieved to the end-user. 

• Use all CPU cores: 

A NodeJS application, in the most basic form, runs mainly on one CPU core, while all others remain unused. You would have to hire NodeJS developers to replicate the NodeJS process and use all the CPUs. You could still utilize the PM2 or Node Cluster for small and medium applications.

However, enterprise-level apps require deployment scripts of the Docker cluster, which are based on the Linux init for process replication. 

If you do not do this, your application will only use 30% or less of your resources. Thus, it will not work at its highest efficiency. 

• Segregate your front-end assets: 

You would have to ensure the usage of suitable middleware to handle the front-end content. Since NodeJS works on a single-threaded model, its performance can be drastically affected if NodeJS deals with many static files. 

Else, the single thread of NodeJS will get busy streaming hundreds of images/HTML/ angular/react files rather than allocating all the resources to serve dynamic content. 

• Be Stateless:

It is important to kill your servers every day! What we mean is, you need to store all types of data within the external stores for data. You can use a “serverless” platform that can enforce stateless conduct, or you can periodically kill your servers. 

A single server failure can lead to the app’s downtime rather than killing the particular faulty machine. This is enough reason to add it into your development routine. 

Moreover, scaling-out elasticity is expected to be of greater difficulty due to the reliance on particular servers. 

Conclusion:

The pointers mentioned above are some of the best NodeJS production practices in the industry. They have been tried and tested by many prestigious development companies and developers. However, if an entrepreneur does not have significant technical skills, they would have to look for NodeJS developers for hire to complete their projects smartly and successfully. 

Once you incorporate these intelligent practices into your team and development routine, your application will get the path of success even from its initial stage.