NATS is an
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
messaging system (sometimes called
message-oriented middleware
Message-oriented middleware (MOM) is software or hardware infrastructure supporting sending and receiving messages between distributed systems. MOM allows application modules to be distributed over heterogeneous platforms and reduces the complex ...
). The NATS server is written in the
Go programming language. Client libraries to interface with the server are available for dozens of major programming languages. The core design principles of NATS are performance, scalability, and ease of use. The acronym NATS stands for Neural Autonomic Transport System.
Synadia develops and provides support for NATS. NATS was originally developed b
Derek Collisonas the messaging control plane for
Cloud Foundry
Cloud Foundry is an open source, multi-cloud application platform as a service (PaaS) governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, a 501(c)(6) organization.
The software was originally developed by VMware, transferred to Pivotal Software (a jo ...
and was written in
Ruby
A ruby is a pinkish red to blood-red colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum (aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sapp ...
. NATS was later ported to
Go.
The source code is released under the
Apache 2.0 License. NATS consists of:
* Th
NATS Server- The core Publish-Subscribe Server for NATS.
Client librariesfor a variety of programming languages
*
connector framework- a pluggable
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...
based framework to connect NATS and other services. NATS is a
CNCF project with
Kubernetes
Kubernetes (, commonly stylized as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management. Google originally designed Kubernetes, but the Cloud Native Computing Foundation now maintai ...
and
Prometheus (software)
Prometheus is a free software application used for event monitoring and alerting. It records real-time metrics in a time series database (allowing for high dimensionality) built using a HTTP pull model, with flexible queries and real-time a ...
integration.
Microservices frameworks such a
MicroMainflux an
Hemerarely on NATS as their messaging backbone.
The NATS server is often referred to as either 'Core NATS' or NATS with 'JetStream'.
'Core NATS' is the set of core NATS functionalities and qualities of service.
'JetStream' is the (optionally enabled) built-in persistence layer that adds streaming, at-least-once and exactly-once delivery guarantees, historical data replay, decoupled flow-control and key/value store functionalities to Core NATS.
JetStream replaced the old STAN (NATS Streaming) approach.
Example
Below is a sample connection string from a telnet connection to the demo.nats.io site:
Trying 107.170.221.32...
Connected to demo.nats.io.
Escape character is '^]'.
INFO
References
See also
*
Prometheus (software), Prometheus nats exporter
Further reading
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{{Message-oriented middleware
Free software programmed in Go
Message-oriented middleware
Cloud infrastructure
Free software for cloud computing
Service-oriented architecture-related products
Enterprise application integration
Free software