Synadia’s NATS 2.0 connects digital systems, services and devices

The general availability of NATS 2.0 was announced to meet the market need for an advanced communications system tailored for modern distributed systems. With the ability to run on-premises, in all cloud providers, as well as in edge computing and IoT devices, NATS.io provides both scalable service and microservice communications, observability, and data and event streaming.

Providing one technology with many communication patterns to support many use cases, NATS 2.0 takes NATS.io functionality to the next level, offering radically easy development and deployment in complex environments, reducing time to market and drastically reducing operational costs; easy-to-use decentralized security; as well as built-in, zero-configuration disaster recovery.

NATS 2.0 can replace multiple technologies like RPC systems, service meshes, event streaming, load balancers, policy and proxy sidecars as well as external security and authentication systems. It has a simple API that allows rapid innovation and easy support for integration with existing technologies.

Current deployments do not need to change; NATS 2.0 can augment existing messaging systems and technologies to get the best out of all systems. Synadia NGS, driven by NATS 2.0 technologies, is a modern and secure global messaging utility with isolated communication contexts and secure sharing, creating the first global digital dial tone.

The goal is to securely connect all of the world’s digital systems, services and devices. NATS.io is in use at enterprises including Capital One, Mastercard, Ericsson, GE, and Dell Technologies’ Pivotal Software.

“NATS was already enough to get me to drop other technologies, but NATS 2.0 is a game changer and actually solves a bunch of security problems as a bonus. It saves us time, dramatically reduces developer and operator friction, reduces cost and gives us increased confidence in our security strategy,” said Kevin Hoffman, Lead Engineer, Capital One Critical Stack.

With a small API surface, little configuration and low touch operations, NATS can drastically reduce operational complexity and costs. Distributed security and authorization through isolated communication and secure data sharing lets organizations self-manage, allowing for a system that can operate at scale while supporting fast, agile development practices in organizations.

Superclusters, distributed security, and self-healing technology along with NATS.io’s multiple messaging patterns allow for a single technology to cover use cases from on-premises and cloud through edge computing to IoT, with one single end-to-end security scheme.

Teams can leverage NATS for the features they need while continuing to use other systems already deployed, as NATS.io can seamlessly enhance systems such as MQ-Series, Apache Kafka and gRPC.

“Businesses need to innovate faster than ever before. Adding new services and collecting more data to optimize for user experience are at the center of many new technologies. However, the ever-increasing flood of new and more complex technologies has led to excessive overhead, operational complexity, slower time to value and much higher costs. NATS.io is simple, secure, performant and resilient. It’s a fundamentally different approach to digital communications,” said Derek Collison, creator of NATS.io and founder and CEO of Synadia.

“NATS 2.0 can dramatically reduce this operational complexity and cost while speeding up development and time to value for modern microservices and event-driven architectures. We believe the market is ready to radically simplify and standardize on a technology that can deliver all of these technologies in one easy-to-use system.”

NATS.io is a simple, high-performance open source messaging system for cloud native applications, IoT messaging and microservices architectures. Developed by a world class team with over a century of combined experience, NATS.io is a proven technology that has been used in production for nearly a decade.

NGS, offered by Synadia, is a commercially available global communications system built on the latest 2.0 release of NATS.io. The first decentralized and secure global utility that can connect all the world’s digital systems, services and devices, NGS is decentralized by design, easy to use and manage, secure by default, and globally available in all major cloud providers.

It allows digital systems, services and devices to communicate through the exchange of messages. To connect to NGS, users only need a single URL – connect.ngs.global – and their credentials. You can be sending and receiving messages from any cloud provider or geographic location within minutes.

Since distributed computing communication technologies have not adequately kept in step with other emergent technologies such as cloud, edge computing, IoT, and microservices, the following problems are prevalent in the enterprise today:

• Security and policies to govern applications, devices and endpoints are difficult to manage at scale, taking up additional headcount and resources.
• Development can be slow because complex systems become fragile and siloed by software, a problem that is normally compounded as services are pushed enterprise-wide. This makes operations professionals hesitant and wary of change.
• There are high operational costs for large-scale messaging product deployments in terms of financial, time and headcount resources.
• Using multiple products or using the wrong product is required to meet the needs of the business.
• Significantly increased operational complexity results when multiple products are used to communicate in different patterns, or when a complex approach is designed to use a single pattern.
• Licensing fees can be expensive and prohibitive, especially when there are open source alternatives.
• Large deployments are difficult to expand and become increasingly fragile as they grow.

NATS 2.0 mitigates these challenges:

• NATS 2.0 provides decentralized security, with securely isolated accounts that can easily share streams and services.
• With NATS 2.0 and NGS, teams create their own accounts where they can define their own imports and exports and policies. This allows them to be agile, free to innovate safely and independently, while posing no risk to the system as a whole.
• NATS 2.0’s simplicity, distributed security and self-healing technologies make it low-cost to develop and operate.
• NATS.io has bundled the most common and valuable messaging patterns including request/reply with transparent scaling and observability, and event and data streaming, into one technology.
• NATS.io is open source, Apache 2.0 licensed and an official incubating project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Paired with Synadia’s expertise, an enterprise can quickly and easily create an extremely reliable, scalable and secure messaging system.
• With superclusters, self-healing technology, built-in disaster recovery and distributed security, NATS.io deployments can grow or change with little to no impact on the overall health of an enterprise’s distributed communications.

Collison added, “Synadia can help enterprises simplify their distributed communications through NATS deployments and enable organizations to get the most of their distributed systems, whether on-premises, in the cloud or at the edge. Enterprises can also take advantage of Synadia’s global NGS service to seamlessly extend their onsite deployments.

“Our mission is to minimize operational spend and unlock new innovative ideas by allowing everything to communicate through NATS. We encourage development teams to give NATS and NGS a try and to experience how much easier their jobs will be—you can get connected and send your first message in under a minute.”