[_frkl]

This sounds interesting, what exactly do you mean by 'endpoint' in this scenario? I looked into a few alternatives before settling for pulsar, and disregarded nats because it didn't seem to support message persistence. I didn't look into it too deeply though, maybe i should have. How do you guarantee no message is lost with NATS?

[tyri_kai_psomi]

In my thinking, I think of an endpoint as something at either end of the communication channel (NATS in this case) where it is effectively terminal. Usually this is where the application logic lies. Dereck Collison (creator of NATS) brings this up in many of his talks about NATS, but I think the source of his thinking might come from “End-to-End Arguments in System Design” by Saltzer, Reed, & Clark.

The core of it is this point:

"Functions placed at low levels of a system may be redundant or of little value when compared with the cost of providing them at that low level."

That is, in order get that message redundancy or exactly once delivery, or message persistence, you pay a high cost, and you may be better off delegating to the endpoints.

This blog provides a good overview

https://blog.acolyer.org/2014/11/14/end-to-end-arguments-in-...

Here is the original paper

http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoen...

[_frkl]

Thanks, much appreciated!

[geodel]

Did you check this?

https://docs.nats.io/nats-streaming-concepts/intro

"..Message/event persistence - NATS Streaming offers configurable message persistence: in-memory, flat files or database. The storage subsystem uses a public interface that allows contributors to develop their own custom implementations."

and

"At-least-once-delivery - NATS Streaming offers message acknowledgements between publisher and server (for publish operations) and between subscriber and server (to confirm message delivery). Messages are persisted by the server in memory or secondary storage (or other external storage) and will be redelivered to eligible subscribing clients as needed."

[tylertreat]

Also check out Liftbridge (https://liftbridge.io), which is a Kafka-like API on top of NATS.

Disclaimer: I'm the author and former core contributor of NATS and NATS Streaming.

[jjjensen90]

I looked at Liftbridge when choosing a streaming platform for event sourcing, but the FAQ says it's not production ready. Is that still accurate?

[tylertreat]

Yes, for more on that see my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21946939

[_frkl]

No, i missed that. I think ive seen 'nats streaming', but didn't realize that it is its own distinct thing. All this makes more sense now to me, thanks!

[NicoJuicy]

Outbox pattern and NATS streaming

[JensRantil]

Additionally, you could always have reliable delivery over NATS using the request/response pattern using acking and retries.