Survey results in: Synadia developers LOVE NATS.
NATS.io — 14 years after its first GitHub commit — has become one of the world’s most successful open-source projects.
While 300 million server downloads and 30,000 GitHub stars are impressive, it’s the 1,000+ contributors that truly showcase its importance in modern applications and architectures. NATS powers essential workloads in some of the world’s largest organizations, ensuring complex distributed systems run smoothly.
But who maintains NATS? Several of its core maintainers and community leads work at Synadia, including its creator (and Synadia’s founder and CEO), Derek Collison, and top engineers who continually shape and drive the project forward.
Plus, Synadians aren’t just skilled engineers and developers. They actively use NATS themselves, making sure it excels in the most demanding environments. They touch everything from hobbyist projects running on a single Raspberry Pi, to real-world distributed systems and mission-critical applications that span clouds around the globe. This hands-on approach ensures NATS remains reliable and high-performing—and trusted by some of the largest global organizations.
When we asked them what they loved most about NATS, 10 core themes surfaced, which we’re highlighting in this post.
What Synadia engineers and architects love about NATS
Here’s what our developers say they appreciate most about NATS:
1. Performance and efficiency
It’s lightweight, fast, low latency, and scalable.
2. Ease of use and management
nats-server is a single binary — now in Golang not the original Ruby from 2010 — deploys easily, operates simply, and “just works.” Its foundational features and configurations are intuitive.
3. Versatility and flexibility
NATS has a plethora of use cases and applications, adapts to different scenarios, works with nomadic applications, and fits anywhere from large to small infrastructure.
4. Powerful features
NATS subsumes microservices, streaming, key-value and object store functionality. It works across cloud providers and regions, as well as on devices in challenging edge environments.
5. Developer friendly
NATS caters to the developer experience from junior developers to chief architects, spanning nearly every industry, including financial services, retail, and telecom. Big companies rely on NATS to be the backbone of their businesses.
6. Architecture Benefits
NATS decouples producers and consumers of messages. It changes applications from silos to connected while simplifying applications and making them robust.
7. Cloud-agnostic and universal
NATS works seamlessly across different cloud environments and can run nearly anywhere. Having client libraries in more than 45 languages doesn’t hurt either.
8. Community and ecosystem
NATS brings a strong community unified to tackle difficult problems. (Did you know our public Slack community has nearly 10k members? Interesting questions are asked and answered every day.) A continuous push exists to support the full potential of current (and future) technology.
9. Transformative Impact
NATS changes how developers create systems and model complex software challenges, which brings our developers immense pride.
10. Simplicity and consistency
Many alternative brokers and queues exist. But 9 times out of 10, NATS requires less code compared to other messaging systems.
Synadia on NATS, in their own words
Our survey also yielded delightful metaphors and insights on what precisely our developers love–and why. A few of the standouts:
Kevin Hoffman, Director of Engineering and multi-time book author:
It just works. NATS is always there. Whether I’m running in a local dev environment or across multiple regions and clusters in prod, my code remains the same.
Alberto Ricart, Software Engineer, on how NATS future-proofs engineering work:
NATS helps applications interact with future applications we’ve not yet dreamed of.
Reuben N, Software Engineer:
I find it pretty easy and common for a junior developer to start building with the NATS stack. At the same time, huge organizations depend on it to do things that no other technology can.
And he’s right. Thousands of organizations, including Fortune 500 companies and innovative startups, have incorporated NATS into their tech stacks since it launched in 2010.
Like many of our developers, software engineer Ziya Suzen first discovered NATS before joining Synadia, when working for a team of engineers on a trading platform at a giant bank in Europe. NATS was a core tool brought in to improve the product and its performance:
The anecdotes I get to hear from people are amazing. Many use it for messaging, caching, and data persistence. It’s quite essential for any software architecture. NATS can become more embedded in systems by default in terms of its protocol, concepts, and logic.
Don’t take our word for it–check how versatile and easy it is to get started with NATS for yourself. Start building with NATS on a free Synadia Cloud trial today.
