Last week, the global NATS community came together virtually for Synadia's RethinkConn 2025, the largest annual event dedicated to exploring the NATS ecosystem, including new NATS capabilities, community innovations, and stories of cutting-edge production use cases.
Missed any part of the event? Below is a comprehensive recap of key highlights, themes, insights from the event. Jump to the bottom for the full recording.
Opening Keynote: Derek Collison
"We bet on the fact that folks in this new era would prioritize decreasing latency to access data and services"
Derek Collison, CEO of Synadia and creator of NATS, kicked off with an engaging keynote highlighting Synadia’s unique "Edge-native and AI-ready" tech stack. He emphasized though that Synadia’s approach to distributed systems was intentionally different (and ultimately better suited for where technology was and is moving): “We started with connectivity, then moved to data, and finally workloads today—the exact opposite of most approaches that begin with workloads and then try to layer in networking and security. We’re changing how systems are designed—not what is being designed.”
As evidenced by real customer use cases, that initial bet is paying off:
Synadia Cloud is handling over 100 billion messages daily
Regulated institutions rely on Synadia and NATS for multi-region support without DNS tricks or load balancers
Synadia customers - from factories to cars to cafes - rely on NATS to make everything securely connected, everything dynamic and agile, everything observable, from tens to hundreds of thousands to millions of managed items within a fleet
Customer Stories
Industrial IoT with MachineMetrics
With thousands of edge devices at hundreds of customer sites, MachineMetrics provides production intelligence for smart manufacturing with NATS and Synadia. MachineMetrics ingests data from the devices and sensors, contextualizes it with other system data and then analyzes it, thus accelerating insights into critical IoT performance at the edge. Watch the recording to hear MachineMetrics break down their entire NATS architecture.
Jochen Rau, engineering manager for the MachineMetrics data platform team, praised the philosophy of NATS, its small footprint for the IoT edge devices and low resource consumption:
"The philosophy behind NATS was very attractive as it allows us to basically decouple where data is consumed and where we have our compute. We don’t have to care about where the data is produced and where it is consumed...NATS is the only technology in the space, really decouples the addressing of data from the access point of data.
That separation is an absolutely unique and powerful feature in NATS that is underappreciated. Once you use it, it leads to a very 'free' architecture and high resiliency."
How PowerFlex handles intermittent connectivity at the edge with NATS
Robbie Hughes from PowerFlex demonstrated how NATS and JetStream tackle intermittent connectivity challenges at the edge, notably in their EV charging infrastructure. He highlighted JetStream’s ability to ensure message persistence despite unstable network conditions, significantly improving reliability and developer experience.
As PowerFlex moves towards a more event-driven architecture, NATS and Synadia have been invaluable:
We are totally shifting to more of an event-driven architecture, and we couldn’t do that without NATS JetStream, especially with the intermittent connectivity. It would take, like, years to set something else up. And the support we’ve gotten from Synadia building this system out has been unbelievable.
ACI Worldwide: NATS for financial transactions
Adrian Florea highlighted using NATS for high-stakes financial transactions, emphasizing NATS' low latency, resilience, and horizontal scalability—all critical in processing millions of card payments seamlessly. In the face of extremely high non-functional requirements in the banking domain, simplicity wins:
This year, we're going to adopt NATs for several ACI products. NAT fits in our distributed horizontally scalable model, being so easy to deploy clusters, and has excellent support for memory and persistent streams via JetStream.
We plan to start offering this as the main messaging option for cloud deployments, basically any Kubernetes based ecosystem, as a first phase... Simplicity is a major advantage. We know that NATS is very easy to install and operate...this shows a very good opportunity to reduce the TCO.
What's New in NATS 2.11
Neil Twigg, Senior Software Engineer at Synadia, introduced exciting new features in NATS v2.11:
Distributed Message Tracing: Enhances observability for developers, clarifying message paths through complex, distributed NATS setups.
Per-Message TTLs: Allows individual message expiry, significantly improving data handling and storage efficiency.
Pull Consumer Priority Groups: Ability to control how a group of consumer clients behave, e.g. overflowing messages to other clients only when certain conditions have been met.
Consumer Pause: Suspend delivery of messages to a consumer, without the application being aware (consumer heartbeats continue being sent to the client). This is ideal for maintenance windows or app migrations.
Stream Multi-get: Introduces powerful batch retrieval capabilities, simplifying data processing patterns.
Partner Insight: Akamai on NATS
Brian Apley from Akamai showcased how their global distributed cloud utilizes NATS to provide unmatched connectivity, latency optimization, and operational visibility. Akamai’s demo reinforced NATS’ potential for running globally-distributed, latency-sensitive applications reliably.
AI/ML Workloads and Distributed Compute
Synadia's Scott Daniels demonstrated how easy it is to use NATS for distributed anomaly detection at the edge. Using an Isolation Forest (iForest) model for lightweight anomaly detection, Scott showcased how easily ML workflows integrate with NATS messaging and JetStream for real-time data streams and model updates.
Perhaps most importantly, the workflow is inherent scalable and flexible. With NATS, relocating resource-intensive components (like model training) is trivial changed. No re-architecting required.
NATS Execution Engine (Nex)
Synadia's Jordan Rash unveiled the re-architected Nex, the final pillar of the NATS stack that enables running workloads anywhere. The rebuild over the last year has yielded better support for workloads that live on the edge and will make it easier for the community to build what they want, when they want it.
His live demo showcased a multi-cloud, multi-geo app (including an air-gapped Raspberry Pi doing sentiment analysis) running entirely on NATS primitives, including Nex. If that wasn't enough, with Synadia Managed Workloads (i.e. globally distributed Nex run by Synadia), Jordan demo-ed how simple it is to redeploy workloads between cloud provides.
Stay tuned for more updates soon. Or find Jordan in the #Nex channel of NATS Slack.
Synadia Connectors
Daan Gertis introduced the new Connectors framework, simplifying how NATS integrates with databases and legacy systems, crucial for enterprises using NATS within existing architectures.
Built on the new NATS Execution Engine (allowing connectors to run anywhere cloud, on-prem, edge), Connectors have a clear, simple responsibility: moving data in or out of NATS.
In his demo, Daan featured MongoDB as both a source and sink, but the sky's truly the limit with connectors.
Stay tuned for more news as Connectors heads towards GA.
Feedback
A few quotes from attendees demonstrate how NATS is resonating with its community:
"Connectivity is a gateway drug"
"This was by far the best online software conference I've attended”
"Great that it was mostly about architecture and use cases"
RethinkConn 2025 reinforced NATS' pivotal role in connecting cloud, edge, and AI-driven applications with unmatched simplicity and robustness. For software engineers and architects exploring future-proof distributed solutions, the sessions showcased that NATS continues to redefine what's possible in distributed systems.
Missed the event and want to soak up every detail? Go deeper and check out the full recording!
