Book Image

Designing Microservices Platforms with NATS

By : Chanaka Fernando
5 (1)
Book Image

Designing Microservices Platforms with NATS

5 (1)
By: Chanaka Fernando

Overview of this book

Building a scalable microservices platform that caters to business demands is critical to the success of that platform. In a microservices architecture, inter-service communication becomes a bottleneck when the platform scales. This book provides a reference architecture along with a practical example of how to implement it for building microservices-based platforms with NATS as the messaging backbone for inter-service communication. In Designing Microservices Platforms with NATS, you’ll learn how to build a scalable and manageable microservices platform with NATS. The book starts by introducing concepts relating to microservices architecture, inter-service communication, messaging backbones, and the basics of NATS messaging. You’ll be introduced to a reference architecture that uses these concepts to build a scalable microservices platform and guided through its implementation. Later, the book touches on important aspects of platform securing and monitoring with the help of the reference implementation. Finally, the book concludes with a chapter on best practices to follow when integrating with existing platforms and the future direction of microservices architecture and NATS messaging as a whole. By the end of this microservices book, you’ll have developed the skills to design and implement microservices platforms with NATS.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics of Microservices Architecture and NATS
5
Section 2: Building Microservices with NATS
11
Section 3: Best Practices and Future Developments

History of NATS

NATS messaging was initially developed for the Cloud Foundry platform as the message bus that was used by internal components to share data. It was initially written in the Ruby programming language since most of the Cloud Foundry components were developed using the same language. The Ruby-based implementation was performing well enough with over 75,000 messages per second being processed by a single NATS server running on commodity hardware. But NATS creator Derek Collison wanted to go even faster.

That is when he decided to rewrite the NATS server and the client using the Go programming language in 2012. This version of the server was processing 2 million messages per second, and it kept improving with time. By now, it can process around 18 million messages per second. NATS also supports cloud-native systems such as microservices and works well with containers and container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes. Due to the cloud-native support provided by...