Changelog Master Feed NATS and the CNCF kerfuffle (Changelog Interviews #641)
May 16, 2025
Derek Collison, the mastermind behind NATS and CEO of Synadia, delves into the fascinating journey of creating a high-performance messaging system for cloud-native applications. He discusses the recent tensions with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, exploring the intricacies of open-source licensing and community dynamics. The conversation highlights NATS' evolution, challenges faced along the way, and the future of messaging systems in a rapidly changing tech landscape.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Derek's Origin of NATS
- Derek Collison created NATS as a simple, high-performance messaging system during his work on Cloud Foundry at VMware.
- The original protocol has remained backward compatible for over a decade, demonstrating its stability and longevity.
NATS Unique Messaging Approach
- NATS emphasizes location independence and push-pull communication primitives, unlike many systems relying on point-to-point requests.
- These primitives offer scalability and efficiency advantages crucial for modern, distributed, cloud-native systems.
NATS Rewritten in Go
- NATS initially served Cloud Foundry needs but was rewritten in Go for performance when building AppSera.
- Go's concurrency and binary deployment advantages fueled NATS' scalability, though new challenges at extreme scale prompted exploring other languages.