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by bruth 230 days ago
(disclaimer: I am the VP of Prod/Eng at Synadia)

NATS - An application connectivity technology (L7). It was originally designed for low-latency M:N messaging, and that is still true today. In 2018, native multi-tenancy, clustering options, etc. got introduced. The persistence subsystem (JetStream) was introduced in 2021. It has a completely different design than Kafka, but with overlapping use cases. For better or worse, we get compared to Kafka a lot and virtually everyone who engages realizes the advantages and opportunities. NATS is much more flexible for application use cases, for example, it provides KeyValue and ObjectStore abstractions on top of the core persistent stream. There are a plethora of other details, but that is the basic gist. Overall, it has a lot of batteries included for building everything from embedded applications to large scale cloud-to-edge systems.

Synadia - The founder (Derek) created NATS. We are the primary maintainers of the project. We build products and services on top of NATS including a global SaaS where you can sign up and use "hosted NATS" with additional features. We offer a BYOC model, one of which we manage for you, or a Kubernetes-based self-service one that you deploy yourself. We also support fully self-hosted for customers that need to run in their own data centers or at the edge.

Regarding the comment re: the website, there are improvements we have in the works. Happy to engage and help clarify anything that is confusing.

1 comments

It would be great to have the questions of “what is it? What is it for?” Answered quickly and succinctly above the fold on the marketing site.

You probably have an influx of traffic that you could convert to customers through “what is this? -> oh cool I could use this!” pipeline if the marketing website enabled that.

What is NATS, how does it compare to other similar software, and why use a hosted solution… all this should be easily found.

And if I see a “enter name and email to download a resource” it just immediately turns me off from even engaging with the site.