Jetstream

• Jun 3, 2026 NATS: The Cloud-Native Nervous System

  NATS is a single-binary messaging backbone that scales from a two-node homelab to a global supercluster without a ZooKeeper sidecar, a broker fleet, or a PhD in configuration. This post covers core pub/sub and subject hierarchies, request/reply, queue groups, JetStream persistence and its KV and object stores, leaf-node topologies for edge deployments, the NKEYS/JWT security model, and an honest comparison to Kafka and RabbitMQ — including where each one actually wins.