In this post we’re going to discuss using Micro on NATS . It includes discussion around service discovery, synchronous and asynchronous communication for microservices. If you would like to learn more about Micro first, check out the blog post detailing the toolkit here. Let’s get down to business. What is NATS? NATS is an open source cloud native messaging system or more simply a message bus. NATS was created by Derek Collison, the founder of Apcera. Read more...

At Sendify we’ve been using nats as a simple and effective means of communicating between our backend services. I came across Nats a few years ago when building a relatively small microservice backed system and it worked wonderfully. With that experience, I introduced it to Sendify this year as the main nervous system for inter-service communication. Our system is mainly processing api requests to various freight carriers based on user searches though we’re also building integration for public api access as well. Read more...

A few weeks ago, the Apcera Platform gained a new service gateway. The new NATS service gateway will allow Apcera Platform users to quickly give their apps a NATS server - without sacrificing security or reliability. In this post, we’re going to demonstrate a simple server that broadcasts data to some clients over NATS. As a distributed messaging system, NATS is lightweight, high performance, and secure - making it ideal for modern architectures. Read more...

Hello everyone. It’s been a great start to 2016, and we didn’t want to go too long without hosting another NATS meetup. Now that we are well past the holiday hangover, and into the conference and event season, before things get too busy we wanted to invite everyone out to our offices in the heart of San Francisco at 140 New Montgomery Street. On March 22nd, we will be hosting a NATS Meetup (RSVP here if you can make it! Read more...

As some of you may have noted, last week a new version of the nats-top monitor for NATS has been made available for download on Github: https://github.com/nats-io/nats-top/releases/tag/v0.2.0 If you’re looking for a bit more information about nats-top, my talk last fall at a NATS meetup on nats-top is here: As nats-top is a top like monitoring tool, so developers who prefer terminal tools such as this will be very comfortable with it. Read more...

Recently I decided to see how easy it would be to create an [AWS Lambda] (https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/) equivalent within the [Apcera] (https://www.apcera.com/) trusted cloud platform and use [NATS] (https://www.nats.io) as an event source for triggering function invocations. This blog entry gives an outline of AWS Lambda, the approach I took to get a first implementation up and running and offers up some thoughts on possible futures. What is AWS Lambda? AWS Lambda (λ) is computation without computers, or at least without the explicit notion of computer machines, virtual or physical hosts; in many ways, the ultimate evolution of Platform As A Service and Microservice architectures. Read more...

Aditiva recently started to use NATS inside solutions for financial institutions that are our customers. In this blog entry, you can learn more about Aditiva, some of our products, and how we use NATS in delivering these solutions for financial institutions. Aditiva provides a High Performance Financial Transactional Platform (Aditiva EFT),that integrates Financial Institutions’ Core Systems, with 3rd party networks. For example, Financial Institution Customers execute different Financial Transactions using Plastic Cards from ATMs and POS networks; these generate ISO 8583 transaction messages, that are captured and routed to authorization services provided by the Aditiva EFT Platform installed on Financial Institution premises or on the Issuer side, and it is managed and supported by Aditiva. Read more...

I’ve attended SCALE a few times in the past, and have always been impressed with the event that the SCALE team puts on each year; but I hadn’t attended in a few years, and it has gone from strength to strength in that time! There are more booths, training sessions, breakout talks / BOF’s, and more developers and interesting open source community members to hear from and collaborate with. As a result, SCALE was held for the first time at the more spacious Pasadena Convention Center: Read more...

When I was tasked with writing a C client for NATS, I decided to use the excellent Go Client as the model. We were going to provide more Apcera supported clients, and for maintainability sake, it was better that all our clients' implementation follow the same model. However, before getting the very first alpha release out, I was not happy with the performance results. I decided to use a tool to instrument the code and see where the bottlenecks were. Read more...

Performance at scale is critically important for building distributed systems today. Microservices and IoT require applications to be distributed across a physical or virtual infrastructure, comprised of thousands, possibly millions of endpoints, many of which can be .NET services or applications. The end user needs these services to operate seamlessly, requiring extremely fast, lightweight, scalable, resilient, and always-on communication - NATS. In developing the NATS C# .NET Client , the . Read more...