Netflix, eBay, PayPal, LinkedIn, Groupon – the names of these apps became a buzzword today. We are used to these applications being an integral part of our everyday lives. And whether we love these apps or not, it is impossible to deny that they are stunningly successful.
As an entrepreneur or a startupper, you may ask: what is their secret recipe of the huge profits and outstanding popularity? And how you can replicate or even surpass their success in your business?
Today we’ll help you to get to the bottom of this mystery a step closer. The secret ingredient number 1 is Node.js.
What benefits these companies gained using Node.js technologies? Read the list prepared by RexSoft..
Netflix: increased the loading speed by 70%
As for the first quarter of 2021, Netflix has more than 207 million subscribers worldwide. Such a huge amount of traffic should be processed fast preserving the high quality of user experience. That’s why the question of interface loading speed is always of crucial importance for Netflix.
For a long time, Netflix was supported by Java backend. It was good for data management but was quite slow and heavy to load. So to increase the efficiency of the frontend and backend communication, in 2015 Netflix decided to switch to Node.js.
As a result, the Netflix interface loading time was around 5-10 seconds. With Node.js, it takes almost 1 second.
We can only guess how that equates to their profits. After all, those for whom waiting 10 seconds was unforgivably long had now also become Netflix fans.
eBay: enhanced real-time performance and optimized software development cycle
Do you need new sneakers? Go to eBay. Do you need a smartphone or even vintage shark’s teeth? eBay is the answer again.
Today this e-commerce platform is on the wave, processing more than a billion service requests daily. A huge amount of online transactions, live communication, and selling propositions published simultaneously are the usual things for eBay that, of course, must be supported properly. That’s why Node.js was a technology of their choice.
eBay’s story was very similar to Netflix’s one. Previously their app’s architecture was also Java-based, which impeded efficient real-time functioning. Moreover, they had troubles with software development speed: it was difficult for their team to deliver new iterations faster.
Thanks to Node.js open-source model and reusable code, eBay managed to facilitate the development process. Also with Node.js microservices, they delivered excellent real-time performance.
PayPal: halved the software development time and doubled the number of processed requests
To continue the shopping theme, let’s talk about one of the most popular digital payment solutions worldwide. According to researches, 87,5% of online buyers choose PayPal among other payment options. As Statista reports, there are more than 361 million PayPal active users today.
Initially built with Java, PayPal decided to switch to Node.js in 2013. By the way, this company was among the pioneers that dared to take this step.
With Java, PayPal delivered extremely slow loading time that resulted in troubles with payment procession and poor performance. Also, the software development cycle took too much time and effort.
Just imagine: a Node.js PayPal app was built more than in half time faster and with a smaller team comparing to their previous Java-based software. With Node.js, they reduced the number of used files by 40% and doubled the number of requests processed per second.
LinkedIn: made their app lightweight
Let’s get off the apps initially developed with Java a little bit. Now we’re going to tell you a short story of the winning shift from Ruby on Rails to Node.js.
According to Insider Intelligence, in 2020 LinkedIn was rated as the most trusted social network in the U.S. Around 73% of users are ?onfident about the reliability of their private data protection on this platform.
With more than 740 million registered members as of 2021, Linkedin is considered to be the biggest Node.js platform today. By the way, the statistics show that around half of these members interact with LinkedIn on daily basis. That’s why it’s very important for this app to preserve a high level of performance and optimize resource usage.
Previously, with Ruby-based backend, LinkedIn had a lot of troubles with processing multiple concurrent requests. The app worked synchronically making the pages extremely heavy to load.
With Node.js asynchronous processing model, LinkedIn fastened the loading speed, made the app lightweight, and reduced the hardware used to serve their app by a ratio of 10:1.
Groupon: achieved better scalability
Who doesn’t like discounts? We bet that it’s almost impossible to find such a person. Probably that’s what makes the Groupon platform one of the most beloved among users (the number of which is 40 million, just to note).
The site was created with Ruby on Rails. Rails technology was a good choice to start with, as it was one of the easiest ways for the development team to get the site up and running quickly. However, the troubles occurred when Groupon began to expand globally. In a short period, they went from operating only in the U.S. to operating in 48 different countries. During that time they also acquired several international companies, such as CityDeal. Each acquisition already included its own software stack.
It became very difficult to maintain and scale the core platform. The simplest task took approximately one month to implement. The platform couldn’t cope with a large amount of traffic.
Thanks to Node.js, Groupon got the independent deployment of changes, increased the speed of page loading by 50%, and ability to scale synchronically with their relevant business goals.
Wrapping-up
Of course, the list of companies above is far from being completed. There are many other apps that every day experience the Node.js benefits:
-great scalability;
-lightness;
-fast loading time;
-enhanced software development cycle;
-cost-efficiency, etc.
However, we hope that at least these several examples inspired you to skyrocket your business with Node.js software development. So don’t hesitate to contact RexSoft – an experienced Node.js development company– right now.