Mary Writes

NATS: The event bus that tries to have it all

The Stack

November 17, 2025

I love it when a discussion about one thing I've written points me at the next thing I should be writing about.

Howard van Rooijen's avatar
Howard van Rooijen
12mo

NATS is just one of those technologies that seems to be done right. They've implemented all the messaging patterns in a way that just makes it so simple to support complex scenarios that you can't easily do with competing products. Messaging / KVP / Object Storage / Mesh Networking / Multi Tenancy /

And sometimes, the topic I've been planning to write about suddenly becomes topical and I get to explain something a lot of people have been talking (and maybe fighting) about.

Mary Branscombe's avatar
Mary Branscombe
7mo

I'd been suggesting to my editor at The Stack that I talk about NATS long before the kerfuffle with the CNCF because people like @hvr.endj.in were being so enthusiastic about the project and interesting projects like @wasmcloud.com were building on top of it.

NATS: The event bus that tries to have it all

NATS: The event bus that tries to have it all

Simple, speedy, scalable, resilient: the fast, lightweight message broker you’re suddenly hearing a lot about has plenty of competition but stands out for its comprehensive approach to event-driven ar...


https://www.thestack.technology/nats-the-event-bus-that-tries-to-have-it-all/
Mary Branscombe's avatar
Mary Branscombe
7mo

Everyone has their own opinion about the politics of the debate about OSS business models but I figured after all that publicity about the arguments, people would want to know what the technology actually does, so I asked @derekcollison.bsky.social to explain why NATS isn't just another message bus

NATS: The event bus that tries to have it all

NATS: The event bus that tries to have it all

Simple, speedy, scalable, resilient: the fast, lightweight message broker you’re suddenly hearing a lot about has plenty of competition but stands out for its comprehensive approach to event-driven ar...


https://www.thestack.technology/nats-the-event-bus-that-tries-to-have-it-all/
Mary Branscombe's avatar
Mary Branscombe
7mo

Really, NATS is more of a Swiss Army knife that does a whole lot of things you need for building IoT and other cloud native workloads that you want to have scale the way infrastructure does...

NATS: The event bus that tries to have it all

NATS: The event bus that tries to have it all

Simple, speedy, scalable, resilient: the fast, lightweight message broker you’re suddenly hearing a lot about has plenty of competition but stands out for its comprehensive approach to event-driven ar...


https://www.thestack.technology/nats-the-event-bus-that-tries-to-have-it-all/
Simple, speedy, scalable, resilient: the fast, lightweight message broker you’re suddenly hearing a lot about has plenty of competition but stands out for its comprehensive approach to event-driven architecture 
NATS: The event bus that tries to have it all
Simple, speedy, scalable, resilient: the fast, lightweight message broker you’re suddenly hearing a lot about has plenty of competition but stands out for its comprehensive approach to event-driven architecture
https://www.thestack.technology/nats-the-event-bus-that-tries-to-have-it-all/
  • CNCF

  • message broker

  • event bus

  • governance

  • Kubernetes

  • IoT

  • distributed systems

  • edge

  • Synadia

  • wasmCloud

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