Dev/ops at npm: scaling the registry

[ceejbot]

At the beginning of the year, the npm registry was unstable & often down. Today it's serving 18 million package downloads per day, with much more traffic for package metadata. How does the npm team bring you the node packages? What did we learn as we stabilized the registry? What are the tools we use to deploy & manage the node services that run the registry? What packages does the package manager itself use? I'll give you the inside scoop.