Articles about NATS, real-time messaging, and building with Spy NATS.
A worked non-use-case: sharing a newly uploaded photo between two browser tabs is better solved with a plain Node.js upload endpoint and Server-Sent Events than by adding NATS as a message broker.
A legal/government use case: routing a document through a multi-step approval workflow, storing the document bytes in the Object Store and the current workflow state (with full history) in a KV bucket for compliance audits.
A hospitality use case: routing incoming orders to the right kitchen station (grill, salad, dessert) using subject-based routing combined with queue groups so each station's cooks share the load evenly.
An automotive use case combining core pub/sub telemetry streaming from a connected car with request/reply for remote commands (like remote-lock) that need a guaranteed acknowledgement.
A retail use case: pushing point-of-sale inventory-decrement events straight into a manager's browser dashboard over NATS WebSocket, with no polling and no backend relay service in between.
A travel/airline use case: coordinating seat-hold, payment, and ticket-issuance as a multi-step saga over JetStream, with compensating events when a step fails partway through.
An education use case: a virtual classroom chat/Q&A subject per session, plus a lightweight presence pattern (who's currently online) built from core pub/sub and a KV heartbeat bucket.
An energy/utilities use case: monitoring a NATS deployment carrying smart-meter telemetry using the built-in HTTP monitoring endpoints, the Prometheus exporter, and nats-surveyor, so operators trust the messaging layer itself is healthy.
An insurance use case: structuring a claims-intake service as a discoverable, monitorable microservice using the NATS Micro framework, instead of hand-rolled request/reply subjects with no built-in discovery.
A manufacturing use case: every production-line event captured immutably in JetStream for compliance audits, plus stream sourcing/mirroring to combine multiple lines into one traceability view without republishing anything.
A telecom use case: a NATS cluster per region for local resiliency, bridged together with leaf nodes so a subscriber in one region can still see events published in another, without a single global point of failure.
A banking/fintech use case: isolating each bank client's messaging with NATS Accounts, NKeys and JWT so tenants can never see or subscribe to each other's subjects, even on a shared server.
An agriculture use case for NATS: soil-moisture and weather sensors across many farms and fields, using subject hierarchy and wildcards to slice the data any way an agronomist needs.
Spy NATS Blog