Open source project used by more than 2,000 companies spanning AI, retail, financial services, and telecommunications

Key Highlights

• NATS has graduated from CNCF, recognizing its maturity as a production-ready messaging and streaming platform connecting distributed applications, services and AI agents.
• More than 2,000 companies across industries including retail, financial services and telecommunications use NATS to simplify distributed infrastructure and support scalable applications.
• NATS unifies messaging and streaming in a single system, enabling reliable, real-time communication across cloud, on-prem and edge environments.

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — KUBECON + CLOUDNATIVECON NORTH AMERICA — The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced the graduation of NATS, an open source real-time communication fabric for distributed agents and applications. NATS unifies messaging, streaming, and state in a single system that connects services, devices, and AI agents. As organizations deploy AI agents, they need a reliable way to find each other, exchange messages in real time, and share state wherever they run, and NATS provides a single system to do it. Companies that use NATS include NVIDIA, Walmart, AT&T, Capital One, MasterCard, PayPal, HP Enterprise, Duke Energy, and Palo Alto Networks.

“As organizations scale distributed systems and AI agents, reliable communication between workloads is critical to operational success,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, CNCF. “NATS’s graduation solidifies it as a production-ready messaging and streaming layer, giving teams the operational consistency they need to connect everything from microservices to edge devices. We’re thrilled to celebrate this milestone and congratulate the maintainers and contributors who have grown NATS over the years.”

Distributed systems must exchange data even as services scale, move between environments, or become temporarily unavailable. NATS addresses this with asynchronous messaging that doesn’t depend on where a service runs, so applications can exchange messages without tightly coupling senders to specific receivers. It runs across cloud, on-premises, and resource-constrained edge environments. Its JetStream capability adds persistence for workloads that need stored messages rather than only live delivery, along with key-value and object-store features. Teams can build distributed systems on one messaging and streaming layer instead of stitching together separate infrastructure for every interaction pattern.

NATS was accepted into CNCF at the Incubating level in March 2018. The project now has 6,377 contributors from 1,674 organizations, more than 400 million downloads, over 2,000 companies that currently use NATS, and approximately 20,900 GitHub stars on its nats-server repository. After adopting NATS in 2025 for a roughly 50-service Kubernetes cluster, technology consultancy Sophotech reported that 99th-percentile latency fell from about 150 milliseconds to about 40 milliseconds, operations time dropped from several hours a week to under one, and queuing delays during traffic bursts shrank from minutes to seconds.

Because [NATS] has not just pub/sub but also request-reply semantics, we can build microservices on the same data plane that query each other or query data. So operationally we have not only a telemetry system but also a queryable data plane that rides the same substrate. It’s not an additional system built alongside the telemetry part — and that’s huge for us. … I keep getting blown away by the feature set. Every time we delve into another piece, it’s like, “oh, that’s already there.”

— Christopher Coco, Software Infrastructure Lead @ Verrus

NATS integrates with a number of other CNCF projects. It provides Helm charts and the NACK operator for running and managing NATS on Kubernetes, and a Prometheus exporter and NATS Surveyor for monitoring. It also works with Dapr as a publish/subscribe layer. wasmCloud, a CNCF Incubating project, uses JetStream to manage WebAssembly application deployments across distributed environments.

What I love about NATS is that the people who adopt it are always looking for the same thing: simplicity. Even in its early days, NATS allowed you to build very sophisticated systems from very lightweight building blocks.

It has been a long road to get there, and it would have never been possible without the NATS community, so I’m very thankful for everyone who adopted and built with NATS throughout the years.

— Wally Quevedo, Senior Software Engineer @ Synadia

NATS’ roadmap builds on its single-system design principle: keep messaging, streaming, and state in one layer that stays simple to operate as deployments grow. The project ships server releases roughly every six months, with the next update (NATS Server 2.16) targeted for March 2027. That update includes:

• Data integrity and self-healing: Checksums on every file written to disk will catch damage on recovery, and cluster servers will be able to restore missing or damaged data from each other automatically.
• Cluster stability: A server rejoining the cluster will no longer force a leader change.
• JetStream at scale: Incremental stream backups from a chosen message onward, and an option to skip pending-message counts to reduce consumer overhead on large streams.
• Key-value state: Key expiration refresh will extend a key’s lifetime without rewriting its value.

To reach graduation status, NATS completed a third-party security audit, by Trail of Bits, facilitated by the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF) with support from CNCF. The audit reviewed areas including authentication and authorization, multitenancy, and input parsing, and noted that all issues had been resolved or accepted by the project when the results were published. NATS also earned the OpenSSF Best Practices badge, documented a vendor-neutral governance model in which each organization gets one vote regardless of how many maintainers it has, and adopted the CNCF Code of Conduct.

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) provides technical leadership to the cloud native community, defining its vision and stewarding projects through maturity levels up to graduation.

Supporting Quotes

“It’s incredible to see how far NATS has come. 16 years ago I wrote the first version of NATS in a weekend. Even though it’s far more capable today, we’ve kept the same core belief: start with simple building blocks and let people compose them. That’s the reason it’s still easy to start with and hard to outgrow.

As modern distributed systems have gained in complexity and stretched from cloud to edge and beyond, NATS has become the central nervous system for modern distributed and agentic systems.”

— Derek Collison, Creator of NATS & Founder/CEO at Synadia

NATS is the only technology in the space that really decouples the addressing of data from the access point of data. That separation is an absolutely unique and powerful feature in NATS that is underappreciated. Once you use it, it leads to a very ‘free’ architecture and high resiliency.

— Jochen Rau, Senior Engineering Manager, Data Platform at MachineMetrics

“Obviously one thing that stands out with NATS, and everybody said it, the simplicity. We at ACI love simple, scalable, resilient things. When we saw one binary that can do it all, we said, ‘yep, that’s the one.’ It aligns very well with our philosophy, with a modernized payment solution. Speed, performance, simplicity, horizontally scalable. That’s what we need.”

— Adrian Florea, Senior Architect at ACI Worldwide

For more information about NATS, visit https://nats.io/.

Additional Resources

• CNCF Newsletter
• CNCF Twitter
• Learn About CNCF Membership
• Learn About the CNCF End User Community

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by nearly 800 members, including the world’s largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

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SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation