As we start the new year it’s a good time to look back at the work of the Red Hat Node.js team over the previous year. Time goes by quickly and it’s easy to forget all the good work and useful assets that we’ve put together. The team is involved in a wide variety of work - from doing the upstream Node.js releases, keeping the V8 JavaScript engine running on Power and s390 platforms, publishing content to help Node.js developers learn and adopt Node.js, and creating guidance for enterprise Node.js deployments. Through our wide-ranging work, we have the opportunity to collaborate with many people from across the community and ecosystem.
Community Involvement
The Red Hat Node.js team continues to represent Red Hat as one of the most active companies contributing to the community Node.js project. From our leadership on the Technical Steering Committee, keeping the build infrastructure in place, helping on the security front by stewarding one of the security releases, doing the build/releases for security releases, and covering 4 of the security triage rotation slots, the team continues to be highly engaged. In addition to the “keep the project running” work we are also active members of the Node-API team team, and help lead forward-thinking efforts like the Next 10 effort. It’s great to see that one of the ways this was recognized this year is that Richard won the 2023 Unsung Hero JavascriptLandia award.
The team is also very active in the v8 upstream that Node.js depends on, keeping V8 running on PPC and s390 architectures which is a big portion of the team’s overall work.
Supporting our Customers
While we do spend a lot of our time on community work, we also work on a number of key initiatives for Red Hat as well. This past year saw our team ship a wide range of assets and content.
Red Hat build of Node.js
The Node.js team works closely with the RHEL team that ships the Red Hat build of Node.js. This year we continued to investigate and resolve issues raised by our customers, including investigating and fixing issues in the community Node.js project so that we minimize the differences between the community Node.js releases and the Red Hat build of Node.js.
Tested and Verified
Most JavaScript applications need more than just the Node.js runtime. In order to minimize risks for our customers the team runs the test for some key modules on UBI with the Red Hat Build of Node.js so that we are confident they run well on our platform. You can check out the list in the documentation for “Tested and Verified”
Node Modules
The team is also responsible for keeping some key modules up-to-date. These modules include opossum, faas-js-runtime and kube-service-bindings.
We would like to specifically call out that opossum saw multiple community contributions that either enhanced the library or fixed bugs. The list of releases can be found here. Thanks to those community members that contributed their time and effort
Node.js Reference Architecture
The Node.js Reference Architecture was again a major focus for our team last year, working to gather and document the experience from across Red Hat and IBM based on our real-world Node.js developments and expertise. This is a key resource for our customers so they can leverage the experience across Red Hat and IBM when it comes to building and operating Node.js applications.
A major goal that we had for last year was to “complete” all the sections of our first phase. I’m pleased to announce that we were able to accomplish this goal. Not only did we complete all the sections of the Node.js Reference Architecture, we also wrapped up our multi-part blog series. The final wrap-up post can be found here
We have also started our next phase, a reference architecture for the web. This is just beginning so keep a look out for new content this year
UBI Buildpacks
Most Red Hat customers will be familiar with S2i, but there are other ways to bundle Node.js applications into containers. In the past year the Node.js team worked to add support for UBI base images into the Paketo buildpacks with the result being an experimental Paketo builder (builder-ubi-base) that supports Node.js (and Java) with UBI base images. If you use buildpacks to create your Node.js applications please try it out and let us know if you have any feedback.
Content
This past year saw a variety of new blog content published to not only the Red Hat Developer site, but we also introduced a new “Introduction to Node.js” learning path on both the Kubernetes by Example and OpenShift interactive lesson platforms. A goal for this year is to publish a follow-on learning path related to monitoring and metrics for Node.js applications.
If that wasn’t exciting enough, we’ve also published a new and improved Node.js topic page on the Red Hat Developers
Conferences
Similar to last year, the team was back to presenting talks, workshops and assisting at booths. While members of the team attended the “Big” conferences, such as Nodeconf.EU and both JS World Summits(North America and EU), we were also at the Open Source and Finance Forum(FINOS).
The team also attended and participated in multiple Node.js community collaborator summits that were co-located with Nodeconf and JS World.
See the following articles covering our participation at these conferences:
- Red Hat Node.js team experience at OpenJS World and Open Source Summit North America 2023
- Red Hat Node.js team experience at OpenJS World and Open Source Summit Europe 2023
- Open Source in Finance Forum 30 second wrap up | Red Hat Developer
- NodeConf EU 2023 Wrap up - 30 second Red Hat perspective
Looking forward to 2024
In 2024, we’ll continue to be active in the community, supporting the planned new major releases of Node.js 22 and 23. We’ll also be continuing to develop our Web Reference Architecture and much more.
Happy new year from the Node.js team at Red Hat!
