Why Telefonica Digital is Bullish on the Future of Nodestack

So why is Telefonica Digital a strong supporter of Nodestack? It's all about the need for speed - and MongoDB and Node.js. Applications in today's world require insane speed at all the various application tiers - from front-end to server to data layer.

Why? Because consumers and businesses have gotten used to blazing connections at home and they have no patience for lagging connections. Companies like eBay measure the response times of their websites and now precisely how each additional millisecond of latency decreases sales and conversions.

And it's about to get much, much worse. The era of LTE has dawned. Wireless networks are about to get much faster. The slowest link in the chain gets the blame and that better not be in the application stack. Ergo, the next generation of real-time Web and mobile apps will need to deliver data and content to handsets and tablets even faster to keep end users happy. Which brings me to Node.js and MongoDB and why we are supporting Nodestack.

Both Node.js and MongoDB are lightning fast. The asynchronicity of Node enables faster movement of data between application tiers and caching layers. The blinding speed, ease-of-use and scalability of MongoDB makes it unquestionably one of the best choices for low-latency Web and mobile apps (also meaning M2M – we're big on that at Telefonica Digital by the way).

Now add SmartOS, the third component to the Nodestack. SmartOS enables MongoDB and Node to run even faster by allowing more of the application to run in memory through efficient data caching and by eliminating the need for a hypervisor layer (in the Node-Mongo-SmartOS stack, there is no need for a GuestOS or a virtualized hardware layer). In fact, in our own lab tests working with Telefonica's Innovation + Development teams, we clocked significantly faster performance of MongoDB on SmartOS versus running on virtual machines supplied by some of the largest public cloud providers.

This is part of the reason why Telefonica Digital decided to invest in Joyent and why we are building our own Joyent-powered public cloud called Instant Servers. (FYI - Instant Servers Nodes are live in Madrid and London with wider coverage in Latin America and Europe coming soon; contact us if you want to spin up some machines and take a test drive.) The name Instant Servers also alludes to another benefit of SmartOS. Namely, that provisioning new SmartOS virtual machines happens in minutes or less - and often is nearly instantaneous.

Telefonica Digital's cloud team sees this ability to deliver speed - both in provisioning, and in a differentiated application stack built around Node and Mongo (among other NoSQL datastores) - as a critical advantage in a speed-obsessed world of real-time applications. We've only been out talking about Instant Servers with small developers and large companies for a few months. But we are already seeing the Nodestack come up frequently in conversations. So we're bullish on the Nodestack future. That plus we love flame graphs from @dapsays and @brendangregg.

The First Nodestack Online Conference will be held October 17th, 2012 9am PST.Follow the conversation at #nodestack.

Check out Telefonica's Instant Servers site here.

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Post written by alexsalkever