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Learn

This section holds the long-form deep dives in the NATS documentation. Each deep dive walks through one subsystem from first encounter to working confidence, building up a single running scenario, the Acme ORDERS platform, step by step.

Deep dives sit between two other layers of the docs:

  • Concepts Short primers and Getting Started. Read those first if you're new to NATS.
  • Reference Exhaustive, versioned catalog of every configuration option, header, and wire-protocol detail. Deep dives link out to Reference for the full surface area, since Reference is a catalog rather than a teaching resource.

Every deep dive follows the same pattern: it uses one running scenario, introduces at most two new concepts per page, provides runnable examples in CLI and the client libraries, and links out to Reference for the remaining detail.

Develop​

Build applications with NATS.

  • Core NATS the foundation: publish-subscribe, subjects and wildcards, request-reply, queue groups, and scatter-gather.
  • Services the micro request-reply framework: endpoints, groups, discovery, observability, and scaling.
  • JetStream the persistence layer: streams, consumers, and the acknowledgment loop, built up from a single ORDERS stream.
  • Resilient Clients production-grade connections: reconnection, drain, slow consumers, request-reply resilience, and TLS plus auth.
  • Key-Value Store buckets, watches, history and revisions, TTLs, and how KV sits on top of a stream.
  • Object Store chunked blobs over JetStream, with metadata, links, and listing.

Operate​

Run, scale, and secure NATS.

  • Topologies Topological shapes: a single server growing into a cluster, a super-cluster, and leaf nodes at the edge.
  • Security authentication, authorization, and accounts: centralized and decentralized auth, TLS, and auth callout.
  • Clustering & Replication the mechanism under a cluster: routes and gossip, RAFT and leaders, R=3 quorum, placement, and peer management.
  • Monitoring & Observability the monitoring endpoints, JetStream health, advisories and events, and Prometheus with dashboards.
  • Backup & Recovery stream snapshots, mirrors for disaster recovery, a recovery runbook, and backing up identity.
  • Deployment & Upgrades production: sizing, Kubernetes, config management, rolling upgrades, and hardening.

Where to start​

If you're new to NATS, start with the Core NATS deep dive; it's the foundation every other chapter builds on. If you're already comfortable with the basics and here for persistence, go straight to the JetStream deep dive.