Scalable Alternative to Apache Kafka and Flink for Advanced Streaming

While NORAD’s real-time tracking of Santa Claus’s sleigh across the globe is an annual tradition of the ultimate fleet manager, the NATS.io community is constantly challenging the boundaries of what is possible from a distributed scale perspective. Whether for creating interactive analytic dashboards for fleets of millions of sensors, to integrating plant floor data for predictive maintenance, or delivering latency sensitive AI workflows to edge devices, the topics discussed in this article are exactly the areas that distributed engineers and architects are trying to solve today.

What a great holiday gift from our partners at Pathway to all of the developers that need to deliver distributed applications and services in 2025. A step-by-step developers guide for supporting Real Time Fleet Monitoring use-cases that does not depend on heavyweight platforms like Flink or Kafka.

Be sure to check out the full article of great content and sample code from Pathway:

https://pathway.com/blog/build-real-time-systems-nats-pathway-alternative-kafka-flink

About the Authors

• Shlok Srivastava | Lead Engineer at Pine Labs
• Sergey Kulik | Lead Software Research Engineer at Pathway