No Cracks In NATS, CNCF Connects For Cloud Comms
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has made statements this month in association with high-performance data platform company Synadia to underpin the future of the NATS project.
Open source at its core, NATS is designed to enable secured real-time data exchange and communication across cloud computing environments spanning public resources, on-premises deployments and edge IoT worlds.
But cloud computing is inherently architected, associated and aligned with an inherent need to enable and facilitate communication and networked intercommunication, so why is NATS important and what does the project’s name stand for in the first place?
Why NATS, Now?
Not the National Air Traffic Service, NATS stands for Neural Autonomic Transport System. It is (arguably) tough to decide whether the neural network relevance aspect of its name is more important than the luxuriant prospect of autonomic self-managed controls that exist at the transport layer… so let’s agree it’s both.
Why does cloud computing communication need reinvigoration? Because (and there’s no spoiler alert here, we all know this stuff) the complexity of microservice-based applications and the fragmented nature of now-more-distributed cloud infrastructures (with intelligent IoT fanning the edge out even further) means the networking topography has shifted.
So, what will Synadia do in line with the CNCF next with NATS? As project founders, Synadia has always positioned this technology as an easy-to-use replacement for some more complex configurations when building lightweight microservice applications.
According to the NATS developer documentation pages, “Developers use one of the NATS client libraries in their application code to allow them to publish, subscribe, request and reply between instances of the application or between completely separate applications. Those applications are generally referred to as ‘client applications’ or sometimes just as ‘clients’ throughout this manual (since from the point of view of the NATS server, they are clients).”
By forging closer bonds with the community oversight prowess of the CNCF, the NATS team wants to reinforce governance and pursue further codification, certification and validation within the NATS universe. As such, Synadia has agreed to assign its two NATS trademark registrations to the Linux Foundation.
Sailing Forward On Neutral Stewardship
According to the team involved here, these steps have been taken to further secure the project’s neutral stewardship for the future. The NATS project’s infrastructure and assets–including the NATS.io domain name and GitHub repositories will continue to be held by CNCF, ensuring long-term stability and ongoing open source development under the Apache-2.0 license.
“As steward of the NATS project, CNCF is committed to upholding open collaboration, neutral governance, and shared ownership so NATS can continue to grow and thrive as a community-driven project,” said Todd Moore, SVP community operations of the Linux Foundation. “We value all of Synadia’s efforts in developing and contributing to NATS – including their investment in defense of the NATS trademark– and appreciate their continued support of the project.”
Synadia is a major contributor to NATS and will continue contributing to and maintaining the NATS project. Like all members of the community, Synadia is also free to pursue its own commercial interests by building on top of the open-source NATS project. As would be the norm with any open-source codebase, if Synadia chooses to fork the NATS server code for a proprietary offering in the future, it will do so under a new name.
Extraneous & Almost Nonfunctional Work
According to Stuart Harris in his role as chief scientist at Red Badger, there’s a lot of “extraneous and almost nonfunctional” work that has to be done to support the use of microservices today. Red Badger has a significant involvement with NATS through a partnership with Synadia from the inception of the project.
NATS is designed to act as a single, multi-paradigm, global connective substrate for an organization. It is a key enabler for building the next generation of cloud platforms.
Harris and team say that NATS offers organisations an opportunity to replace generations of infrastructure with just a single, tiny binary. As a message broker and with the recent addition of JetStream, it now operates in the space of persistent streaming (think Kafka) and key value stores (think Redis).
Communication Breakdown
Looking more deeply at the need for better communication facilitators at this level of cloud computing infrastructure, it’s important to remind ourselves that moving from a monolithic architecture to a modern distributed one has special challenges. In simple terms, this move introduces a new complexity in terms of service interaction. In other words, when all application components reside inside a single monolithic, everybody is at the same table and communication is essentially more straightforward.
When we move to distributed, containerized, componentized cloud and look to scale, each microservice will still need to communicate, but this time across different server estates and across different compute, storage and networking environments.
As Cisco engineer and CNCF member Colin Lacy reminds us, “Traditional communication methods like REST or gRPC require a host of supporting tools i.e., load balancers, service discovery mechanisms, circuit breakers and more. This additional overhead not only increases infrastructure costs but also complicates maintenance and debugging. Developers often write agnostic code that isn’t tied to the underlying communication infrastructure. This means that while the infrastructure might be robust, the benefits of these tools rarely translate to the application code itself, leaving developers in the dark when issues arise.”
Real-Time Topology
NATS helps with these issues and excels in horizontal scaling. The system can add more servers to handle increased load without significant reconfiguration. This capability makes NATS ideal for environments where demand fluctuates. The auto-discovery feature enables real-time topology sharing among server clusters. This ensures seamless scalability in hybrid cloud environments. NATS also handles large volumes of messages efficiently with its lightweight protocol that minimizes overhead. It also offers robust data integrity and fault tolerance i.e., clusters of NATS servers work together to ensure high availability.
“NATS has been a labor of love of mine for nearly 15 years now. The entire Synadia team and I deeply care about NATS and have devoted significant resources to its growth and adoption. Our commitment remains unwavering – to provide impactful, accessible technology that benefits the global community. We genuinely look forward to deepening our collaboration with the Linux Foundation and CNCF, ensuring all mature and successful projects within the CNCF receive the robust support they need to thrive,” said Derek Collison, CEO of Synadia and the creator of NATS.
The Linux Foundation’s Todd Moore further echoed Collison’s sentiments by reminding us that NATS is already widely adopted, deeply valued, and working as critical infrastructure for a broad range of adopters.
Users seeking enterprise-grade NATS-based solutions can visit the CNCF community pages here.
