Node.js is a server-side JavaScript platform for building scalable network applications. It uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, especially for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices. Some key features include a single-threaded event loop that handles client connections in a non-blocking way, allowing the system to scale to many connections without slowing down. The core API is written in C/C++ but accessible from JavaScript code. It also has a large ecosystem of open source modules available via the NPM registry.