A new sensation in software development is the microservice idea. Microservices are focused on splitting a large web application into small, tightly-focused services that can be easily developed by small teams. While they aren't exactly a new idea, they're more of a reframing of old client-server computing models, the microservice pattern fits well with agile project management techniques, and gives us more granular application deployment.
Node.js is an excellent platform for implementing microservices. We'll get into this later.