NATS MIGRATION & SUPPORT
When your messaging needs to do more, with less
You’ve seen what messaging complexity costs. The monitors you’re watching at 2am. The topology nobody fully understands anymore. The upgrade that turned into a project. NATS is a different architecture. We help you work out if it’s the right one for you, and get there without the costly wrong turns.
The Technology
Simpler than you’d expect. More capable than it looks.
NATS started as a lightweight pub/sub system, fast, opinionated, minimal footprint. What changed the conversation was JetStream: the persistence layer that extends NATS into durable streaming, key/value storage, and work queues.
All of it runs in a single binary under 20MB. Where comparable systems require a fleet of processes, each with its own configuration surface, its own failure modes, its own monitoring overhead. NATS enables the equivalent with one binary and a configuration file. Features are enabled by configuration, not by deploying more infrastructure.
That matters most in specific situations.
You’re probably not here because NATS sounds interesting…
YOU’RE CURRENT SETUP ISN’T WORKING AS IT SHOULD…
- Queues that build up under burst load?
- Latency spikes that are hard to pin down?
- An ops overhead that’s grown quietly until it became a real cost?
YOU’RE PLANNING SOMETHING NEW AND YOU’RE NOT SURE YOUR MESSAGING LAYER WILL HOLD UP…
- edge workloads,
- IoT,
- a multi-region architecture
What We Offer
VHonest advice on NATS. Delivered by people who know the territory.
NATS services are delivered through a carefully selected and vetted specialist partner. We manage the engagement end to end – framing the problem correctly, overseeing the work, and staying in the room throughout. You don’t get introduced and left to it.
What this looks like in practice:
ARCHITECTURE
ASSESSMENT
Is NATS the right fit for your specific workload? What would a migration actually involve? What do you gain – and what, if anything, do you give up? We work through the honest version of that comparison before anything is decided.
MIGRATION PLANNING
& SUPPORT
We’ve seen enough migrations go wrong to know what makes the difference. Gradual strategies – dual publishing, canary consumers, phased cutover – that give you confidence at each step rather than a single high-stakes cutover.
NATS JETSTREAM IMPLEMENTATION
Subject design, stream configuration, consumer patterns, persistence strategy. Getting the architecture right from the start is faster than correcting it six months later. We’ve seen what good looks like and what fails quietly in production.
TEAM
ENABLEMENT
Your team should walk away genuinely capable – not reliant on us to maintain what was built. Our specialist partners deliver NATS-specific enablement shaped around what your team actually needs to operate independently.
Why Seventh State?
No blind referrals
We assessed our NATS partner against our own understanding of what good production messaging looks like. That’s a different thing from passing on a name.
No tunnel vision
Our experience spans RabbitMQ, NATS, Kafka, and Pulsar. When scope shifts or a decision needs to be made mid-engagement, there’s someone in your corner who can evaluate it independently.
No hand offs
One relationship throughout. We oversee delivery, manage the partner relationship, and stay accountable for the outcome.
One relationship. The full capability map behind it.
Partner Stories
What a RabbitMQ to NATS migration actually looks like
“One team ran tens of microservices on a single Kubernetes cluster – using RabbitMQ for task queues, pub/sub events, and service-to-service RPC. The problems that developed weren’t unusual: queues building up under burst load, latency climbing in ways that were hard to diagnose, and a topology that had accumulated enough complexity that nobody fully understood it anymore.
The migration strategy was gradual. Dual publishing first – writing to both systems simultaneously. Canary consumers on NATS to validate behaviour before committing. Then service-by-service cutover. No big bang, no single point of failure.”
The outcome:
- p99 latency fell from around 150ms to around 40ms
- Ops overhead dropped from several hours a week to under one
- Burst processing that queued for minutes now cleared in seconds
- The cluster tuning configs, shovels, and mirrors are gone”
Let’s talk…
Whether you’re running NATS or exploring a RabbitMQ to NATS migration, we can help.
Alternatively:
Email us: sales@seventhstate.io
Call us: (+44) 02045725726
Book a meeting: in the calendar
Frequently Asked Questions
What is NATS and how does it compare to RabbitMQ?
NATS is a high-performance open-source messaging system built for low latency and operational simplicity. With JetStream, its persistence layer, it handles durable streaming, key/value storage, and work queues – all within a single binary under 20MB. Compared to RabbitMQ, NATS has a significantly smaller operational footprint, simpler subject-based addressing in place of exchanges and queue bindings, and lower latency under burst conditions. RabbitMQ has deeper protocol support (AMQP, MQTT, STOMP) and is the right choice for teams with existing investment in those protocols and the tooling built around them.
When should I consider moving from RabbitMQ to NATS?
The indicators we see most often: queues that build up under burst load causing latency spikes, ops overhead that has become disproportionate to the value the broker provides, topology too complex for the team to reason about clearly, or architectural requirements – edge computing, IoT, multi-region – that RabbitMQ wasn’t designed to handle well.
What is NATS JetStream?
JetStream is the persistence layer built into NATS. It adds durable streaming, key/value storage, object storage, and work queues – all within the same server binary. Unlike append-only log systems, JetStream supports per-message deletion (important for GDPR compliance), subject-based message addressing, and per-message Raft consensus for stronger durability guarantees.
Can NATS and RabbitMQ run alongside each other during a migration?
Yes. The least disruptive migration approach runs both systems simultaneously – dual publishing to both brokers, canary consumers on NATS to validate behaviour, then phased cutover service by service. The systems don’t interoperate natively but coexist cleanly in the same environment.
What does a RabbitMQ to NATS migration typically involve?
The key architectural shift is replacing RabbitMQ’s exchange/queue/binding model with NATS subject-based routing. This is simpler in most cases but requires deliberate subject design upfront. The migration itself is typically gradual: dual publishing, canary consumers, then service-by-service cutover. No big bang.
Is NATS a replacement for Kafka?
Not directly. Kafka is optimised for very high-throughput append-only log processing with deep ecosystem integration. NATS JetStream is optimised for operational simplicity, low latency, multi-tenancy, and edge deployment. There is meaningful overlap, but the primary use cases are different. Teams evaluating both need an honest assessment of their specific workload.
Does Seventh State deliver NATS services in house?
NATS services are delivered through a carefully selected and vetted specialist partner. Seventh State manages the engagement – framing the problem, overseeing delivery, and remaining in the room throughout. Our own in-house expertise is in RabbitMQ and cross-technology messaging architecture advisory, which is what allows us to make technology recommendations honestly rather than just selling a capability.
