To be clear, NATS is not a heavy messaging broker like RabbitMQ. For one, it's in-memory only, and queues only exist when there are consumers: If you publish an

To be clear, NATS is not a heavy messaging broker like RabbitMQ. For one, it's in-memory only, and queues only exist when there are consumers: If you publish and there are no subscribers, the message doesn't go anywhere. NATS is closer to ZeroMQ than RabbitMQ or Kafka. A lot of people use HAProxy to route messages via HTTP to microservices — what's HAProxy if not a glorified message queue? If you don't use an intermediate — meaning you to point-to-point HTTP between one microservice and another — you have to find a way to discover peers, perform health checks, load-balance between them, and so on. Which you can do — services like etcd and Consul exist for this — but using an intermediary such as NATS or Linkerd [1] is also a great, possibly simpler solution. [1] https://linkerd.io/ https://linkerd.io/