Building complex applications with distributed systems like Kubernetes and microservices – especially when you want those applications to scale like the environment they run in does – or using flow architectures relies on event-driven architecture: asynchronous messaging with events and message queues.
Message brokers like NATS (and alternatives like Kafka and Redpanda) provide a reliable communications layer to manage and route those messages, handling queuing, filtering and delivery at scale, even without direct connections between the publisher and consumer of a message. That can dramatically simplify application architectures; what NATS promises is a simple, lightweight and fast technology for message passing with subject based filters that allows you to build a messaging architecture without thinking about load balancers and proxies – or a lot of the other components.
