You've been deploying Node.js wrong. For years, the community has treated Node.js as a simple runtime—start a process, put it behind a reverse proxy, scale horizontally. But this approach ignores fundamental architectural problems that become painfully obvious in production: the single-threaded event loop bottleneck, inefficient resource utilization, fragmented tooling, and the operational complexity of managing multiple services.In this talk, I'll make the case for why Node.js needs a proper application server—and why we built Watt to solve these problems. We'll go deep into the architecture: how SO_REUSEPORT enables kernel-level load distribution without IPC overhead, how multiple workers within a single deployment unit can achieve near-linear scaling, and how a unified runtime can orchestrate frontend frameworks like Next.js alongside backend microservices.You'll see real benchmark data: 93% faster median latency compared to PM2 clusters, 99.8% reliability under sustained load, and dramatic reductions in infrastructure costs. More importantly, you'll understand why these improvements happen at the architectural level.Whether you're running Next.js, Fastify, or any CPU-bound Node.js workload, you'll leave with a fundamentally different perspective on how Node.js applications should be built, deployed, and scaled.No magic. No hype. Just better architecture.
