The Quest Begins (The "Why") Honestly, I still remember the first time I tried to ship a production‑ready Express API. It felt like I was Luke Skywalker staring at the Death Star plans—excited, a little terrified, and completely sure I’d missed a crucial piece of the puzzle. My endpoint worked fine on localhost:3000 , but as soon as I spun up a second instance behind a load balancer, things started to glitch: sessions vanished, cache hits turned into misses, and my logs looked like a scene ...