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:

The talks were great, and I can’t wait to view some more of them on YouTube since I could only attend a handful!

As some of you may recall, last year NATS was featured at SCALE in a talk by Derek Collison - the creator of NATS and Founder/CEO of Apcera:

This year, we decided to take things to the next level, and were a sponsor! The NATS booth had steady traffic, and we enjoyed giving away Shirts, Stickers, whitepapers, and a Sphere BB-8:

I am pleased to announce that Swee Sng is the lucky winner of the Sphero BB-8. Congrats Swee, We hope you will enjoy it!

To those of you who did stop by the booth, it was great to hear more about what each of you are up to, how you use Linux and open source for personal projects, and at work, and your viewpoint on where the industry is heading.

I had some really insightful conversations with some of you about IoT messaging - NATS delivers secure, lightning fast, and ultra low-latency messaging in this scenario. Those of you who are considering - or already taking advantage of - microservices architectures also had some great questions and comments. We’re seeing many developers interested in breaking applications and complex services into many separate services, and NATS is a great microservices transport. Finally, I talked to quite a few people looking for a more lightweight and faster messaging technology than traditional enterprise service buses provide, and we discussed some of the possibilities there and how NATS would make their life (much) easier!

Here are a few photos from the booth:

Harsh Karmakar and Henry Stapp enjoying meeting attendees and manning the booth

That’s me – need a NATS shirt? I have you covered (pun intended!) – just drop me a line brian@apcera.com

Interested in learning more about NATS? I’d be happy to hear your input and welcome you to the NATS Community.

Here are some ways to get involved:

• Follow us on Twitter
• Download NATS on Github
• Join the Slack Community, Google Group, and the Meetup via the NATS Community page