Notes on NATS Keynote

• Overview
• What is NATS
• NATS Ecosystem
• Usage Examples
• NATS Community

Overview

I recently heard about NATS, a “message oriented middleware”. It is a software infrastructure that provides the exchange of data that is segmented into messages among computer applications and services. I was curious about it’s potential in applications that involve streaming real-world sensor data, so I decided to check out there 2019 keynote. Below are some notes I took while watching.

What is NATS

NATS is a simple, reliable, cloud-native messaging system

Goal of Project: Be the enabling technology to securely connect all the world’s digital systems, services and devices.

Connect Everything:

• Shared utility of any size
• Decentralized and Federated
  • Mix a shared utility with your own servers and security
• Secure by default, no passwords or keys, powerful authorization
• On-Premise, Multi-Cloud, Multi-Deployment, the Edge, and IoT
• Communicate, Publish, Consume, and Save and Restore, State

• Healthy and thriving Ecosystem, of Services and Streams

• Scalable services and streams

Quality of service

• Over 30 different client programming language implementations (Nov. 2019)

• Highly resilient and self healing

Example Use Cases:

• cloud messaging
  • services (micro-services)
  • Event/Data streaming (observability/analytics)
  • Command and control
• IoT and Edge
  • Telemetry/Sensor Data/Command and Control
• Augmenting or Replacing Legacy Messaging

Can support hundreds of thousands of nodes with really fast response times (700ms)

Some Companies Using NATS

• CHORIA
• Netlify
• Mastercard
• StorageOS (Now ondat)
• Tinder
• Platform 9
• Qlik

NATS Ecosystem

Integrations

• curl command to install and deploy to Kubernetes
• Prometheus Exporters, Fluentd Plugin and OpenTracing/Jaeger support
• Dapr.io Component Integration
• Spring Boot Starter
• NATS Cloud Stream Binder for Spring
• NATS/Kafka Bridge
• NATS / MQSeries Bridge
• Go-Cloud and Go-Micro pub/sub integration

Basic Messaging Patterns

• Services - Request/Reply
  • Scale up and down
  • location transparency
  • observability
• Streams - Events and Data
  • Scalable N:M communications
  • Realtime and persistent
  • playback by time, sequence, all or only last received

Accessing a NATS System

• Free Community Servers
  • demo.nats.io (both open and secure versions)
• Kubernetes
  • curl [https://nats-io.github.io/k8s/setup.s](https://nats-io.github.io/k8s/setup.sh)| sh
• Docker
  • docker run -p 4222:4222 -ti nats:latest
• Additional Information
  • Installing a NATS Server

Usage Examples

HTTP vs NATS (requestor)

HTTP

resp, err := http.Get("http://example.com/")
if err != nil {
	// handl error
}

defer resp.Body.Close()
body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(resp.Body)

// decode body

NATS

nc, err := nats.Connect("demo.nats.io")
if err != nil {
	// handle err
}

resp, err := nc.Request("example.com", nil, 2*time.Second)
// decode resp.Data

HTTP vs NATS (service)

HTTP

http.HandlFunc("/bar", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r*http.Request){
	fmt.Fprintf.(w, "Hello World")
})

log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)

NATS

nc, err := nats.Connect("demo.nats.io")
if err != nil {
	// handle err
}

sub, err := nc.QueueSubscribe("bar", "v0.1", func(m * nats.Msg) {
	m.Respond([]byte("Hello World"))
})

NATS Community

• Over 1,000 contributors
• 33 Client languages (Nov. 2019)
• 75 Public Repos
• 100M NATS Server and Streaming Server Docker Downloads
• ~1,600 Slack Members
• 20+ releases since June 2014
  • https://nats.devstats.cncf.io/d/9/developers-summary
  • Grafana

References:

• Keynote: NATS: Past, Present and the Future - Derek Collison, Founder and CEO, Synadia