Trade-offs between Kafka and NATs in performance, scalability, and deployment

Most message systems have an opinion on the right way to do inter-systems communication. Whether it’s actors, queues, message logs or just plain ol’ request response, nearly every tool has decided on The Right Way to do messaging, and it optimises heavily for that specific approach. But NATS is absolutely running against that trend. 

In this week’s episode, Jeremey Saenz joins us to talk about NATS, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s configurable message-passing and data-transfer system. The promise is a tool that can happily behave like a queue for one channel, a log like another and a request/response protocol for the third, all with a few client flags.

But how does that work? What’s it doing under the hood, what features does it offer, and what do we lose in return for that flexibility? Jeremy has all the answers as we ask, what is NATS really?

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NATS on Github: https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server

NATS Homepage: https://nats.io/

Getting Started with NATS: https://youtu.be/hjXIUPZ7ArM

Developer Voices Episode on Benthos: https://youtu.be/labzg-YfYKw

CNCF: https://www.cncf.io/

The Ballerina Language: https://ballerina.io/

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