NATS is a fast, secure message queueing system with an unusually wide range of features and potential deployment targets. At first glance, you would be forgiven for asking why the world needs another message queueing system. Message queues have been around in various forms for nearly as long as businesses have been using computers and have undergone years of refinement and optimization for various tasks. But NATS has several interesting characteristics and is unique in its ability to scale from embedded controllers to global, cloud-hosted superclusters. We're particularly intrigued by NATS's intent to support a continuous streaming flow of data from mobile devices and IoT and through a network of interconnected systems. However, some tricky issues need to be addressed, not the least of which is ensuring consumers see only the messages and topics to which they're allowed access, especially when the network spans organizational boundaries. NATS 2.0 introduced a security and access control framework that supports multitenant clusters where accounts restrict a user's access to queues and topics. Written in Go, NATS has primarily been embraced by the Go language community. Although clients exist for pretty much all widely used programming languages, the Go client is by far the most popular. However, some of our developers have found that all the language client libraries tend to reflect the Go origins of codebase. Increasing bandwidth and processing power on small, wireless devices means that the volume of data businesses must consume in real time will only increase. Assess NATS as a possible platform for streaming that data within and among businesses.
