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. NATS.io already provided a built-in HTTP monitoring endpoint, allowing developers to introspect state information from the server. This also makes devising custom monitoring tools for NATS easy - just poll data from this endpoint.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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 .NET Framework SDK’s extremely rich API eliminated reliance on third parties, but most importantly, performance is there. The NATS .NET client, currently as a beta release, can publish over 3 million messages per second within a Windows VM on a MacBook pro.

NextGen Leads aims to provide extremely high quality health insurance leads and Medicare supplement leads by streamlining the lead buying experience from end to end. Our leads are generated internally by a team of lead generation experts; they are not brokered by any third party. They are then delivered in real time and never oversold, passing through various filters to ensure that our customers can place bids on only those leads that they want. In fact, our unique second price auction model ensures that our customers always pay the minimum amount necessary to win a lead.

NATS is all about simplicity and speed. In that regard, NATS is extremely well suited for microservices architectures, acting as a transport between services. Many NATS users I speak to in my role as community manager are using NATS for this purpose due to it’s lightweight PubSub characteristics. As services become increasingly distributed and modularized, an always-on, fast, PubSub communication layer becomes very important. NATS allows many distributed services and applications to function in real-time as a single entity. A large portion of these same NATS users are also using Docker for their containerized services.

Bill Chute of Acadiant Limited has been using NATS for some time, and has given us some great feedback along the way. As Bill has stated in the past

“We considered a number of modern messaging platforms. NATS was the clear choice because it’s the highest-performance message broker we could find, and it solidly supports all the languages in our stack. Because of its clean design, it was easy for us to get up to speed with NATS and it gives us the scalability and responsiveness we need.”

The audience at the London Meetup was great! We had many local companies represented, and some of the leaders of other meetups such as Alexandre González Rodríguez (one of the organizers of the Go London ! Meetups), and Milos Gajdos (co-organizer of the Kubernetes London Meetups) present as well. I enjoyed meeting everyone, and getting your feedback after the talks.

My talk was focused primarily on:

• What is NATS? Some meetup members were new to NATS, so in a nutshell, NATS boils down to simplicity and mind-blowing speed. Raul Perez had a great anecdote in his talk about how fast NATS was, even on his Macbook Air, where NATS nearly “melted” his machine!
• Some performance characteristics of NATS, where I discussed some benchmarks from Tyler Treat’s blog and also from CenturyLink’s ImageLayers.io tool, which David Williams explained nicely in a recent tweet: