NATS has a similar protocol to Redis and optimized for this use cause of doing pub/sub based low latency Request/Response instead of HTTP. The payload is opaque

NATS has a similar protocol to Redis and optimized for this use cause of doing pub/sub based low latency Request/Response instead of HTTP. The payload is opaque so you can use msgpack if needed, and the protocol also supports sending headers now: https://docs.nats.io/nats-protocol/nats-protocol#protocol-messages https://docs.nats.io/nats-protocol/nats-protocol#protocol-me... (disclaimer: I'm one of the NATS maintainers :) )