Separate service on NodeJS server - node.js

I want to know how to structure my NodeJS server.
I want to separate services proposed on my website to mount cluster in the future and to have many servers (each allowed to one special task).
Example :
The 'main' server which have one project : ExpressJS and Database
The 'communication server' which have one project : Chat + Forum
Others projects : For complex computing (generating chart / stats / emailing)
Could you explain me different approach for this type of complex website ?

Like Benjamin Gruenbaym said, the architecture belongs somewhere else.
If you are wondering about how to setup the applications on an individual server, there are a few things to keep in mind.
NodeJS runs in a single process, so it should ideally take up 1 core of the CPU. If you run a database on the same server, that is another core. So it may be fine to host all node applications on the same server, if it has a sufficient number of cores.
To run two different Node processes on the same machine, you simply start them one after another, but make sure that they listen on different ports.
To make sure that you can scale out your application later, it is important that you use domain names, instead of IP adresses when you identify your services to each other. So the nodeJS app should know about the database as mydatabase.mycompany.com, not as 192.168.1.10 or any other ip address. This will allow you to later move the database to another network address or to use a load balancer.

Related

NodeJS TLS/TCP server in need of an external firewall

Problem:
I have an AWS EC2 instance running FreeBSD. In there, I'm running a NodeJS TLS/TCP server. I'd like to create a set of rules (in my NodeJS application) to be able to individually block IP addresses programmatically based on a few logical conditions.
I'd like to run an external (not on the same machine/instance) firewall or load-balancer, that I can control from NodeJS programmatically, such that when certain conditions are given, I can block a specific remote-address(IP) before it reaches the NodeJS instance.
Things I've tried:
I have initially looked into nginx as an option, running it on a second instance, and placing my NodeJS server behind it, but after skimming through the NGINX
Cookbook
Advanced Recipes for High Performance
Load Balancing I've learned that only the NGINX Plus (the paid version) allows for remote/API control & customization. While I believe that paying $3500/license is not too much (considering all NGINX Plus' features), I simply can not afford to buy it at this point in time; in addition the only feature I'd be using (at this point) would be the remote API control and the IP address blocking.
My second thought was to go with the AWS/ELB (elastic-load-balancer) by integrating AWS' SDK into my project. That sounded feasible, unfortunately, after reading a few forum threads and part of their documentation (unless I'm mistaken) it seems these two features I need are not available on the AWS/ELB. AWS seems to offer an entire different service called WAF that I honestly don't understand very well (both as a service and from a feature-stand-point).
I have also (briefly) looked into CloudFlare, as it was recommended in one of the posts, here on Sackoverflow, though I can't really tell if their firewall would allow this level of (remote) control.
Question:
What are my options? What would you guys recommend I did?
I think Nginx provide such kind of functionality please refer to link
If you want to block an IP with Node TCP you can just edit a nginx config file and deny IP address.
Frankly speaking, If I were you, I would use AWS WAF but if you don’t want to use it, you can simply use Node JS
In Node JS You should have a global array variable where you will store all blocked IP addresses and upon connection, you will check whether connected host IP is in blocked IP variable. However there occurs a problem when machine or application is restarted, you will lose all information about blocked IP-s. So as a solution to that you can just setup Redis (It is key-value database but there are also other datatypes) DB and store blocked IP-s there. Inasmuch as Redis DB is in RAM all interaction with DB will be instantly and as long as machine or node is restarted, Redis makes a backup on hard drive and it syncs from it and continue to work in RAM with old databases.

Proper architecture to serve several separate, unconnected multi-page websites under one single internet domain?

I own a humble one-server internet domain.
I am migrating from the Apache/php world to the node / angular / react world.
Within this domain, I have various separate projects. One is about my city, another is about my high school, a third is my portfolio, and so on.
One project might be a static SPA, the other might be a huge and highly dynamic professional production-level multi-page app with several frameworks, database connections and the whole kitchen sink.
One might be in react, the other in angular.
In short, a very diverse tech stack distributed among encapsulated applications.
I'm at the thinking stage, where I am considering the right way to run all these apps in one machine, in one domain, the modern way.
In the old Apache days, you would run one instance of Apache and it would serve everything with no problem.
Should I structure my code folders all as child folders of the one domain website?
In this new world, if I have ten websites do I have to run ten instances of a daemon like this Option A:
One instance of node, or whatever daemon, serves and routes all MPAs:
daemon1
my-domain.com
+--HighSchoolWebsite
+--SanFranciscoWebsite
+--PortfolioPage
Or should it be more like this Option B:
daemon1
+--HighSchoolWebsite
daemon2
+--SanFranciscoWebsite
daemon3
+--PortfolioPage
and if it is Option B, won't the daemons be listening at different ports? I would have to tell people to go to a url with a port number, like mydomain.com/myportfolio:2452. I've never seen this, so it must not be the way it's done, so what's the right way?
I have tried Googling this obviously but most answers tend to discuss MPAs for one single project, not SPA+MPA for several different projects.
Obviously I'm a beginner a bit lost at sea and would appreciate any tips, tricks, hints, rumors, etc.
Thanks very much.
Gee, thanks to all the downvote fairies for being so helpful to someone just trying to learn.
In case anyone else finds themselves at a similar stage, the answer is a "process manager" + a "reverse proxy".
A process manager is like a command that permanently serves your apps. It will keep your various apps running forever whether they be node, or php, or angular. Each app can be assigned a nickname. The process manager I chose was PM2.
A reverse proxy then maps the incoming requested url to the particular app listening on its chosen port. The reverse proxy I used was nginx.
So, for example, let's say you have phpApp running on port 1943. Let's say that in PM2 you nicknamed it pretty-happy-app. During dev, you would visit
http://localhost:1943
to see your pretty-happy-php app running.
Since you want a) external visitor to visit without knowing the port, and in fact you want to b) hide the port for security reasons, you use a reverse proxy like nginx.
You configure nginx to map the url to the port. During dev, assuming you're using your local machine, the configuration would be something like:
http://localhost/pretty-happy-app ---> localhost:1943
Once you go public, nginx would map like this:
http://your-domain.com/pretty-happy-app ---> your-public-machine:1943
I hope this helps someone in the future, not like the too-cool-for-school downvote fairies.

Setup Node server with multiple websites and have each site on its own thread

I have a laptop that I am running node on, a Ubuntu Server with a quad core processor.
There is a plan for 2-3 sites on this server and I am not a really good admin and needed help getting this one site going so I dont want to start from scratch and run a hypervisor. Is there a way to have node host 3 sites and have each of the run on their own thread of the processor? I understand Node is single threaded and while I really dont need to do this for performance (because its just for development) I do like this as an exercise in doing things in node and it would be cool! There is an entire second laptop for the database so Im not worried about resources.
So 3 sites on one instance of Ubuntu Server all on different threads.....
It's not entirely clear what you're trying to accomplish. Here are a couple scenarios:
Create three separate node.js servers, each listening to their own port and they will each be running their own node.js process independent of the other. Then have each client connect to the appropriate port.
Create three separate node.js servers, each listening to their own port and they will each be running their own node.js process independent of the other. Use NGINX as a proxy in front of the three web servers and you can let NGINX direct requests all on port 80 from each of the three domains to the appropriate node.js web server. Using NGINX this way, all three web servers can appear to be be running on the default port 80 (or 443) and NGINX will separate them out and direct them to the appropriate web server process.
Create your own master node.js process that receives requests for all three domains, looks that the host header to see what domain the request was actually directed at and then forward that request to the appropriate child process. This would be similar to the way clustering works in node.js, but each child process would be each of your different web servers. Personally, I'd use the pre-built functionality in NGINX to do this for you (as described in option 2 above), but you could code it yourself if you didn't want to run NGINX.
Instead of NGINX, use some sort of load balancer that your ISP may already have to direct the incoming connections to the right server process.
If you run 3 different applications ie. sites then they will be running as different processes on your server which assuming all run on different ports, there should be no problem running them simultaneously. When you refer to node being single threaded that applies to a single process so each process has its own event loop running.

Keeping Multiple Servers in a Cluster In-Sync?

I'm currently managing a cluster of PHP-FPM servers, all of which tend to get out of sync with each other. The application that I'm using on top of the app servers (Magento) allows for admins to modify various files on the system, but now that the site is in a clustered set up modifying a file only modifies it on a single instance (on one of the app servers) of the various machines in the cluster.
Is there an open-source application for Linux that may allow me to keep all of these servers in sync? I have no problem with creating a small VM instance that can listen for changes from machines to sync. In theory, the perfect application would have small clients that run on each machine to be synced, which would talk to the master server which would then decide how/what to sync from each machine.
I have already examined the possibilities of running a centralized file server, but unfortunately my app servers are spread out between EC2 and physical machines, which makes this unfeasible. As there are multiple app servers (some of which are dynamically created depending on the load of the site), simply setting up a rsync cron job is not efficient as the cron job would have to be modified on each machine to send files to every other machine in the cluster, and that would just be a whole bunch of unnecessary data transfers/ssh connections.
I'm dealing with setting up a similar solution. I'm half way there. I would recommend you use lsyncd, which basically monitors the disk for changes and then immediately (or whatever interval you want) automatically syncs files to a list of servers using rsync.
The only issue I'm having is keeping the server lists up to date, since I can spin up additional servers at any time, I would need to have each machine in the cluster notified whenever a machine is added or removed from the cluster.
I think lsyncd is a great solution that you should look into. The issue I'm having may turn out to be a problem for you as well, and that remains to be solved.
Instead of keeping tens or hundreds of servers cross-synchronized it would be much more efficient, reliable, and most of all simple maintaining just one "admin node" and replicating changes from that to all your "worker nodes".
For instance at our company we use a Development server -> Staging server -> Live backends workflow where all the changes are transferred across servers using a custom php+rsync front end. That allows the developers to push updates to a Staging server in the live environment, test out changes, and roll them to Live backends incrementally.
A similar approach could very well work in your case as well. Obviously it's not a plug-and-play solution, but I see it as the easiest way to go - both in terms of maintainability and scalability.

Dev environment for multiple server setup - Nodejs

This is my first time building out something with multiple servers. I wanted to know if anyone could point me towards a guide for setting up a dev environment (windows) for a backend that will be set up on multiple servers ie one server for the API, one for another set of processes (ie file compression) and one for everything else.
Again, just trying to figure out if it's possible to set up a dev environment to test out the system on my local machine.
Thanks
You almost certainly want to run virtual machines (on something like VMWare or VirtualBox) to really test multi-machine stuff. However, I also develop for multiple machines every day (we have an array of app servers, an array of background worker servers, e-commerce servers, cache stores and front proxies—and I still just develop on one virtual machine that has all that stuff running on it. Provided you make hostnames and ports configurable for everything, there's not much difference between localhost port 9000 and some.server.tld port 8080. Actually running all the VMs on a single computer would likely be painful, both in terms of system resources and complexity.
There are tools to help with setting up VMs with similar or the same configurations too. Take a look at http://vagrantup.com/ and also http://babushka.me/.
Just my $0.02.

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