Building Microservices with Node.js: A Complete Guide

The demand for apps that are scalable and adaptable keeps growing as technologies develop. This is where Microservices Architecture comes in. It enables developers to put together an app by breaking it down into smaller, independent services, each handling a specific task.

Thanks to its speed and ability to manage multiple operations simultaneously, Node.js has become the logical choice for building these services. 

Big companies such as Walmart, Netflix, and PayPal use Nodejs microservices to better enhance app performance and flexibility.

We will explain to you in this article why Node.js is the best way to build microservices and can improve your development workflow at the same time. 

First, we shall give a short overview of what microservices are and why they are so necessary for modern apps.

Understanding Microservices Architecture

Microservices architecture is a modern design approach that structures applications as a group of business capabilities and software elements. 

This architecture allows for independent development, deployment, and scaling of services. It fosters agility to enable greater innovation in projects. For Nodejs microservices, it hands over Node. js's non-blocking I/O and offers better performance and responsiveness.

Each service communicates over lightweight APIs, enabling easy integration and maintaining loose coupling. Developers need to understand this architecture to develop scalable and maintainable applications with Node.js. This accelerates iteration and resource use across various technology stacks.

Monolithic vs Microservices in Node.js

As a back-end developer, you may already be familiar with Monolithic Architecture and Microservices Architecture.

Both methods have differences, key benefits, and drawbacks depending on how they are implemented in Node.js.

We have provided an in-depth comparison of both methodologies below.

Monolithic vs. Microservices Architecture Comparison

Advantages and Disadvantages of Monolithic Architecture

Advantages:

• Simplicity in deployment and development is due to a unified codebase.
• Small applications are much easier to manage.
• It requires fewer resources for the operation of smaller applications.

Disadvantages:

• Less scalable as the application expands.
• A change in a part of the application can require testing the whole system extensively.
• Restriction in technology stack flexibility.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Microservices Architecture

Advantages:

• High scalability and flexibility; each service can evolve independently.
• We’ve increased fault tolerance so that issues in one service don’t impact anything else.
• Allows for diverse technology stacks across services.

Disadvantages:

• More complex deployment and management are due to multiple services.
• Requires careful planning and design for inter-service communication.
• Potential overhead due to inter-service calls.

How Do Communication Patterns of Node.js Microservices Work?

In a microservices architecture, good communication between services is crucial for building large-scale, high-throughput applications. Node.js has several communication patterns, each with its advantages.

Here is a summary of the main methods of communication used in Node.js microservices:

Synchronous Communication (HTTP)

With synchronous communication, services communicate via RESTful APIs. One service sends out a request and waits for the other to respond before it can do anything further. 

This means it takes time as each service must wait for the response, but at least things are simple. However, as a consequence, if many services are involved, then this pattern will slow down your application's performance.

Asynchronous Communication Using Message Queues

In asynchronous communication, services communicate using message queues. One service invokes a message to the queue and doesn’t wait for a response.

When the receiving service is ready, it pulls the message from the queue. This allows the services to be decoupled and reduces the wait time, improving performance. 

This approach is more flexible because the consuming service can process the request as resources permit.

Event-Driven Architecture

In an event-driven architecture, services consume and respond to events on an event bus. They don't sit idle waiting for requests from other services. Instead, they listen for events — like when a new user signs up — and react accordingly.

This enables each service to own and manage events independently. Node.js’s event-driven nature is a natural fit for this since it allows smooth responsiveness and scalability.

Why Use Microservices with Node.js?

When you pick Node.js for building large-scale apps, it comes with lots of useful JavaScript modules. With the Nodejs microservices framework, you can build a system that is easy to maintain and scale over time.

For those looking to implement this architecture, Node.js development services can provide the expertise needed to design, build, and deploy microservices using Node JS efficiently. One can choose to hire Node JS developer to handle the task and ensure the system is built with the best practices.

Benefits of Building Microservices with Node JS

So here are some reasons why using Node.js microservices will help you develop your backend.

1. Scalability and Lightweight Architecture

Node.js was designed to scale up. It is lightweight, so microservices can handle vast amounts of traffic without using a ton of server resources. Horizontal scaling is easy, which means that your app will grow quickly and efficiently. This is a huge plus when building Node JS microservices architecture.

2. Increased Resilience

With microservices in Node JS, every service works independently. You can update or change one service without breaking the rest of the application. Also, the error handling in Node.js microservices is terrific, allowing services to recover quickly. This makes your application more robust and less likely to go down.

3. JavaScript Everywhere

An advantage of microservices with Node JS is that you can use JavaScript for both server and client. This provides consistency and makes your code easier to manage. Teams can develop more quickly because there is no need to learn multiple languages for the front and back ends of apps.

4. Non-blocking I/O and Event-Driven Model

Node.js uses a non-blocking I/O model. This makes it good at handling many requests at once without slowing down. Because it is event-driven, this makes Node.js awesome for real-time apps such as chats or live streaming—speed is everything. The advantages of Node.js development include fast performance, real-time data handling, and easy scalability.

5. Better Performance

The Node JS microservices architecture can increase the performance of your app. As it divides the whole thing into small independent suites, you can start rolling out changes, fixing bugs, and optimizing services without interrupting the entire system. This translates to improved response times and overall performance.

6. Rich Ecosystem

Thanks to microservices Node JS, developers have the potential to benefit from npm, which is the package manager that provides thousands of modules.

This reduces development time because you can quickly take a tool or feature and get it into your app. The other side of the extensive ecosystem is that it enables you to customize your Node.js backend developers for hire according to your requirements.

Frameworks for Building Microservices in Node.js

When it comes to building microservices in Node JS a few frameworks stand out. These frameworks remain popular due to their ease of use, scalability, and powerful capabilities. So let’s take a look at some of the most common ones:

1. Express.js

Express.js is generally considered to be the de facto standard when it comes to building web applications and APIs for Node.js. With a minimalistic approach, code quantity, and flexibility on top of that, users can easily build robust APIs quickly. Key benefits include:

• High productivity: It will be an efficient development process.
• Performance: With its non-blocking architecture, it efficiently processes many concurrent requests in parallel.
• Customization: All application logic is easily customizable.

2. Hapi

Hapi is another powerful framework that offers a rich set of features to build applications. Designed for scalability, the built-in support offers input validation, caching, and more. Hapi is extremely useful when writing microservices that are highly structured and offer extensive configuration options.

3. Feathers

The Feathers framework is light and designed for building real-time applications and REST APIs with much less effort. Developers can build services in no time, and it comes with support for different databases. Feathers are particularly powerful for real-time capabilities in addition to traditional RESTful services.

4. NestJS

NestJS is a progressive framework built with TypeScript that combines elements of object-oriented, functional, and reactive programming. It is particularly suited to building scalable server-side applications and microservices and stresses modularity and maintainability. Its main features are:

• Dependency injection: Code is better organized with a facility.
• Extensive ecosystem: Integrates well with other libraries and tools.

5. Moleculer

Moleculer is a modern microservices framework that comes with out-of-the-box features like load balancing, fault tolerance, and service discovery. Built for efficient distributed systems, it's ideal for complex applications that need high availability and resilience.

Steps to Build Microservice in Node JS

Developing microservices with Node JS requires an organized method that produces applications that are scalable and maintainable.

Here are the steps to create a microservice that integrates external APIs. It will calculate the distance between two ZIP codes.

Step 1: Understand Your Business Requirements

Before we get started, we’ll need to decide what our microservice needs to achieve. For example, let’s say it’s a service that calculates the distance between two ZIP codes. In such cases, we will need to call an external API to find out how far apart they are by road.

It's important to first figure out what your app needs to do before delving into coding. Node.js back-end development services are most successful when you have a clear idea of the task at hand.

Step 2: Install Node.js and Set Up Your Project

First, install Node.js on your computer. You can download the latest version from the official Node.js website. After installation, all your project dependencies will be managed by npm (Node Package Manager).

Start by creating your project folder. Then run this in your terminal:

$ npm init

This command creates a package.json file. This file is like the brain of your project; it tells npm what packages you use.

After that, install Express.js (a lightweight back-end framework) and Request (which helps you make API calls) by running:

$ npm install express request --save

Tip: Keep your dependencies up to date and use version control to track changes.

Step 3: Setting Up the Server

This time you are going to create the server. It will be in a file called server.js. Here is how to write your server and handle requests as a start:

var express = require('express');  
var app = express();  
var port = process.env.PORT || 3000;  

// Import routes
var routes = require('./api/routes');  
routes(app);  

// Start the server
app.listen(port, function() {  
    console.log('Server started on port: ' + port);  
});

It is at this point that Node.js microservices come to life. It listens for requests and answers them according to the routes you have set up.

Step 4: Define Your Routes

Next, we need to modify your route information. The routes of your microservice are what your server listens to and responds to.

For example, we will create two routes: one for showing general information (/about) and another to calculate the distance between two ZIP codes (/distance/:zipcode1/:zipcode2).

Here’s what your route file might look like:

'use strict'; var controller = require('./controller');
module.exports = function(app) {
app.route('/about').get(controller.about);
app.route('/distance/:zipcode1/:zipcode2').get(controller.get_distance); };

Your app needs to know how to respond to various request types.

Step 5: Create the Controller Logic

Now, we have to write the logic of those routes. The controller is where your microservice has its basic functionality. In controller.js you should add code that does this.

'use strict';
var properties = require('../package.json');
var distance = require('../service/distance');
var controllers = {
about: function(req, res) {
var aboutInfo = {
name: properties.name,
version: properties.version
};
res.json(aboutInfo);
},
get_distance: function(req, res) {
distance.find(req, res, function(err, dist) {
if (err) res.send(err);
res.json(dist);
});
},
};
module.exports = controllers;

This will handle the /about route as well as the /distance route by returning info from package.json and calling a distance function.

Step 6: Set Up External API Calls

Because we're calculating distances, we need to call a third-party API. We'll use the ZipCodeAPI.

This is how you can set up the request to find the distance:

var request = require('request');  
const apiKey = process.env.ZIPCODE_API_KEY || "your-api-key";  
const zipCodeURL = 'https://www.zipcodeapi.com/rest/';  

var distance = {  
    find: function(req, res, next) {  
        request(`${zipCodeURL}${apiKey}/distance.json/${req.params.zipcode1}/${req.params.zipcode2}/mile`,  
        function(error, response, body) {  
            if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {  
                response = JSON.parse(body);  
                res.send(response);  
            } else {  
                res.send({ distance: -1 });  
            }  
        });  
    }
};
module.exports = distance;

This will deliver a response to the ZipCodeApi. The answer is, of course, the distance between two ZIP codes.

Step 7: Run Your Application

Now your app is ready to go! To start up that server, simply run:

$ node server.js

Your Node.js microservice is up and ready to do something useful—it can give the distance between zip codes.

Tip: Always test your microservices before going live. Make sure your code works as you expect it to; take care of any edge cases that might crop up.

Challenges and Solutions in Microservices with Node.js

Building microservices with Node JS can offer immense scalability and flexibility, but as you pointed out, it also comes with challenges. The solutions you proposed are pragmatic and reasonable. Let’s break down these points further:

Managing Distributed Systems

Kubernetes and Docker are in their place so that with them, containerized microservices can be deployed, and scaled out, and consistency can be maintained across the different environments.

Kubernetes orchestrates services and handles failover. Docker ensures a consistent environment across development, testing, and production.

Service discovery tools such as Consul and Eureka work well in dynamic environments where microservices scale up or down. With these tools, services can discover and connect automatically. This removes the need to hard-code service addresses. It also helps in maintainability and scalability.

Handling Data Consistency

Data consistency in distributed systems is always a tricky subject. The Saga pattern works great for handling long-running transactions across services.

It provides that if a step fails, compensatory action is taken to persist in consistency. This sidesteps the complexities and performance costs associated with traditional distributed transactions.

By using event sourcing and CQRS, read and write operations are separated. All this results in less rigid and more efficient structures. Event sourcing is a pattern in which you maintain an immutable log of state changes.

This log helps with audibility and enables the reconstruction of past states. CQRS allows for independent growth of read and write models. Thus reducing contention and improving scalability.

Avoiding Latency in Service Communication

For decoupling microservices, asynchronous messaging systems such as RabbitMQ and Kafka are wonderful. They bring reductions in blocking and can shoulder traffic peaks even better. Which is just what you need when services talk to one another over a network.

Caching solutions like Redis can help cut back on read latency by keeping regularly accessed data in memory. For high-frequency queries, this performance improvement is crucial.

Regular performance testing detects bottlenecks and ensures the system remains healthy. Prometheus and Grafana are common tools for visualizing metrics and catching anomalies early.

By tackling these challenges with the right tools and techniques, you can improve the robustness and reliability of a Node.js microservices architecture.

Conclusion

Node.js has many benefits you can use for microservices, including a powerful and non-blocking architecture with high concurrency and a stable ecosystem.

By using microservices with Node JS, organizations can create scalable, flexible, and resilient systems. Such systems are better suited to the needs of contemporary applications.

Decoupling monolithic architectures into smaller services makes development faster and the system more reliable. As the need for scalable solutions increases, now might be a good time to consider Node.js for your microservice architecture.