Talk given at ITNIG in Barcelona on 10/22/15

1. NATS
A nervous system
for modern
distributed systems

2. Thank you! (&
Housekeeping)
• Raul Perez
• Maria Encinar (ITNIG.com)
• Eric Pinto
• Issel Guberna
• You!
• QnA after each talk

3. Brian Flannery
• NATS Community and Ecosystem Manager
• @brianflannery
• brian@apcera.com
GitHub: bjflanne
• I want to hear from you – get in touch! We are here to
help

4. Created by Derek Collison
• Google 6yrs
• TIBCO > 10yrs
• Former CTO, Cloud Platforms @ VMware
• Architected TIBCO Rendezvous and EMS
• Architected the OpenPaaS CloudFoundry
• Building Messaging Systems and Solutions >
20yrs

6. What NATS is..
✓ High-Performance
✓ Always on and available
✓ Extremely light-weight
✓ Fire and Forget - At Most Once
✓ Pub/Sub
✓ Distributed Queues
✓ Request/Reply

7. Always-on dial tone; an
analogy

8. What NATS is NOT..
✓ Enterprise Messaging System
✓ Persistence
✓ Transactions
✓ Enhanced Delivery Models
✓ Queueing Product

9. New distributed architecture (Docker, Ansible, etc) uses NATS in conjunction with Asterisk and ARI fo
r distributed applications independent of the core.
NATS abstracts business logic from core VoIP call delivery allowing for far greater speed and scale.
Microservice-to-Microservice communication: NATS is replacing REST, and also run gnatsd in Marath
on. Use consul and consul-template for auto-scaling NATS cluster.
All services are written in Go. Single JSON REST API. Need to send notifications, email digests, and o
ther event-driven via PubSub, not API. NATS simplicity and speed/scalability are a big win.
PubSub broker for metrics/monitoring system tracking big data for IoT products
CoreOS running on AWS. NATS handles microservice-to-microservice communitcation. Solves service
discovery problem, and is simpler than full-blown HTTP. Because NATS round-robins queue groups,
now longer need load balancer on on a service, either.

11. Performance

12. Performance
• Originally written to support CloudFoundry
• In use by CloudFoundry, HTC, Baidu, Apcera and
others
• Written first in Ruby -> 150k msgs/sec
• Rewritten at Apcera in Go (Client and Server)
• First pass -> 500k msgs/sec
• Current Performance -> 8M msgs/sec

13. Background
• Good Performance is good
• Predictably Good Performance is king!
• Measure everything (can’t fix what you don’t
know)
• Understand your data
• Understand your user experience
• Don’t be a failure of your own success
Performance 4k payloads
Courtesy - http://www.bravenewgeek.com/dissecting-message-queues/

14. Performance and Simplicity*
*top image via CenturyLink imagelayers.io

15. Supported Clients

16. Community Clients

17. Summary
✓ Modeled to be always-on dial-tone
✓ Always available - NATS protects itself
✓ High-Performance server
✓ Clustered Servers / Cluster aware
Clients
✓ Clients in many languages, contribute!

18. Community Update

19. Growing Community
• Updates to monitoring tools:
https://github.com/
repejota/nats-mon
https://github.com/cmfatih/
natsboard

20. Growing Community
• New clients:
https://github.com/
jedisct1/rust-nats/
https://github.com/
DawnAngel/lua-nats

21. Growing Community
• New integrations:
https://github.com/
octante/
OctanteNatsBundle

22. • Over 300,000 Docker Image Downloads to date, one
of the most popular on Docker Hub
• Gained Docker Official Image Status in Q3 2015’
• One of the smallest and more performant images on all
of Docker Hub

23. New Releases
• Docker Image is now an Official Image on DockerHub
• Go client updated to v1.1.2
• Node.js Client update to v 0.4.4
• Gnatsd server updated to v 0.6.8

24. New NATS.io site

25. New Docs

26. New Meetups
http://www.meetup.com/
Barcelona-NATS-Cloud-
Native-User-Group/
http://www.meetup.com/
London-NATS-Messaging-
User-Group/

27. New Meetups
http://www.meetup.com/
NATS-Cloud-Native-
Meetup/

28. New Slack Community

29. More to come…to a city
near you

30. Get involved!
• GitHub: https://github.com/nats-io
• Interwebs: www.nats.io
• Contribute content for the project (eg. Benchmark,
overview of how you use NATS in your environment,
etc.)
• NATS has formal Formal RnD Support, looking for large
partners to anchor the community

31. Brian Flannery
• NATS Community and Ecosystem Manager
• @brianflannery
• brian@apcera.com
• I want to hear from you – get in touch! We are here to
help