NATS is a solid piece of engineering. I rank it alongside Postgres and Memcached in terms of reliability and convenience. It just works. I have an app in produ

NATS is a solid piece of engineering. I rank it alongside Postgres and Memcached in terms of reliability and convenience. It just works. I have an app in production that publishes real-time events via NATS at high volume, and it has never failed. You do have to understand its design -- NATS can drop messages, and your application has to deal with this. One lesser-known feature of NATS is that it's embeddable -- if you're writing a Go app, you can use it as a library. You end up with a single statically linked binary that can do everything out of the box. Liftbridge looks like a neat way to add a layer of statefulness to NATS. I have an app that will need a log abstraction, and have been hoping to avoid integrating any oversized guns like Kafka (whose dependency on ZooKeeper makes it operationally more complex) and Pulsar for what is a fairly simple system.