Node.js is single-threaded. As every design decision this one has its benefits and drawbacks. A benefit is - it is significantly harder to "shoot yourself in a foot" with multithreaded code. With languages like C++ or Java, multithreading is a separate subject that is rather advanced and even considered to be a form of a black magic by some developers. So in JavaScript you don't even have to think about scary terms like "deadlock", "race condition" or "memory barrier". What's the downside?

Writing UDP server with Node.js Different application require different design of networking protocols. Everything that is built for web is using HTTP (recently WebSockets and WebRTC too for real-time data). If your clients are not browsers and you need reliable and guaranteed channel your choice is TCP/IP. There's however one more protocol that is often used for the cases when the speed is more important that delivery guarantees and ordering: UDP. UDP stands for Unified Datagram Protocol and it shines in the applications like fast-paced online gaming.

Most of the times Node.js is used for HTTP-based servers. There are times however when you need to go one level deeper, and write your software based on TCP/IP protocol instead of HTTP. Indeed, HTTP was originally designed as a request-response protocol, and it is text-based. TCP/IP is more "raw": it is binary (meaning, more effective) and also it is full-duplex persistent connectinon (which again means it is more effective). If you are building an application that is not targeted specifically at browsers, there's a good chance that TCP/IP will be a better choice to you than HTTP.

Data visualisation is becoming an increasingly important subject. As the complexity an volumes of data increase, it is getting harder and harder to make sense of bare arrays of numbers without relevant visualisation models. Let me give you a good example. Right now I work in China. Few months ago there appeared a new startup: bycicle sharing service that used GPS sensors on each bike to track it in the city. Now let's imagine, you need analyse how evenly your bikes are distributed around the city and how many of them are in motion right now.

Moving your project to a cloud might be a difficult task especially since there are so many different cloud services out there. AWS is the most popular one and Azure is a very close competitor. In this article I will show you how to start using Azure, namely its NoSQL database service - DocDB. NOTE: Azure is a great platform, however it has significantly less tutorials and examples available online (compared to AWS). Before we start to write the code we will need to prepare the dependencies.