A message broker is an architectural component that sends messages between different nodes in a distributed system.

Message brokers are useful because the sender of a message does not always know who might want to receive that message. Message brokers can be used to implement the “publish/subscribe” pattern, and by centralizing the message workloads within the pub/sub system, it lets system operators scale the performance of the messaging infrastructure by simply scaling that pub/sub system.

Derek Collison has worked on messaging infrastructure for 25 years. He started at TIBCO, then spent time at Google and VMWare. When he was at VMWare, he architected the open source platform Cloud Foundry. While working on Cloud Foundry, Derek developed NATS, a messaging control plane.

Since that time, Derek has started two companies–Apcera and Synadia Communications. In our conversation, Derek and I discussed the history of message brokers, how NATS compares to Kafka and his ideas for how NATS could scale in the future to become something much more than a centralized message bus.

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