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Comment by pnpnp | Hacker News Reader

Just my 2c but for anyone unaware, you should check out NATS.

It combines the best of both Kafka and RabbitMQ IMO.

I thought NATS didn't actually store messages, am I mistaken?

Looking at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATS_Messaging) I see that I'm technically right, it's JetStream that does the storage layer - but it's part of the NATS server.

From memory, I really liked the philosophy of NATS but found the nomenclature confusing.

I think they call that part of NATS “Jetstream” if I’m not mistaken. I haven’t used it, but I believe it has some form of message persistence.

I have used it mostly for message-first services, and found subject-based messaging a breath of fresh air to decouple services. You can do the same thing with RabbitMQ topic exchanges, but it requires quite a bit more hand-waving.

Jetstream does indeed have message persistence: I can issue queries like “get messages on topic since 5 minutes ago” - I do this a ton. However, that seems to be the extent of the storage/query API that it exposes for historical messages. I’m quite a big fan, and would recommend it with the caveat that Jetstream is considerably more complex than simple nats and I get the feeling I’m barely scratching the surface with it.

I’m really interested in a Kafka like message broker in the Go ecosystem and look forward to checking it out for whatever my next project ends up being.

It’s pretty cool. I would personally suggest Kafka or RabbitMQ depending on your needs, as Jetstream has proven to require a lot of ops engineering to remain stable in production

NATS JetStream also implements subject-based addressing at the stream level (unlike Kafka where 1 stream = 1 topic, and you can only use the message's key for distribution, not for addressing).

So you can for example ask for [the first/the last/all] of the messages on a particular subject, or on a hierarchy of subjects by using wildcards. All the filtering is done at the server level.

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