Changelog Master Feed NATS and the CNCF kerfuffle (Changelog Interviews #641)
May 16, 2025
Derek Collison, the mastermind behind NATS and CEO of Synadia, delves into the fascinating journey of creating a high-performance messaging system for cloud-native applications. He discusses the recent tensions with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, exploring the intricacies of open-source licensing and community dynamics. The conversation highlights NATS' evolution, challenges faced along the way, and the future of messaging systems in a rapidly changing tech landscape.
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Extreme Scale Challenges
- NATS servers achieve about 20 million raw message operations per second, but customers now demand scaling to billions.
- Handling billions of messages with unique subjects poses memory and indexing challenges requiring innovative data structures.
Building Synadia Around Edge
- Derek began NATS around 2010 and spun out Synadia in 2017 to commercialize it for enterprise and edge use cases.
- Synadia bets edge computing will dominate interactions, requiring new models beyond traditional cloud-native approaches.
CNCF Fit and Commercial Reality
- CNCF membership and graduation requirements evolved to emphasize diverse contributor bases, impacting projects like NATS.
- Synadia questioned if projects driven mainly by one company fit well in CNCF's ecosystem and raised concerns about zero commercial compensation from large users.