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

How does the NATS protocol work?

At the beginning of this chapter, we mentioned that NATS is designed to cater to the requirements of modern distributed systems while providing a simple interface to work with the clients. That is why the NATS protocol, which defines the interaction between the NATS server and the NATS client, has a simple set of commands that are based on plain text messages with a publish and subscribe type model. A simple TCP client such as Telnet can communicate with the NATS server using these protocol commands.

Protocol conventions

The NATS protocol uses a set of conventions to make sure that both the client and server understand the messages that are shared:

  • Control line with optional content: Every communication that happens between the client and the NATS server consists of a command message followed by optional data. Only the PUB and MSG commands carry a payload (data) with the command.
  • Field delimiters: The different parameters and options...