Architecture: NATS

A microservice publishes an order event. Three other services need to know about it: inventory has to decrement stock, billing has to charge the card, and shipping has to queue a label. In a lot of systems, that fan-out means standing up a broker, provisioning disks, tuning partitions, and running a coordination service alongside it. Then you check the memory footprint and realize the messaging layer is heavier than the services it connects. NATS … Read More

Explained: MQ on z/OS

A customer submits a mortgage application on a bank's website. The web server accepts it immediately and shows a confirmation. Behind the scenes, that application needs to pass through a fraud check, a credit bureau lookup, an underwriting system, and a document management platform. Each of those systems runs on different infrastructure, at different speeds, and is maintained by different teams. The web server cannot wait for all of them. It… Read More

Explained - Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT)

Ever wondered how your smart thermostat "talks" to your phone, or how a sensor on an oil pipeline sends data thousands of miles away? Chances are, MQTT is behind it. What is MQTT? MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is a lightweight messaging protocol designed to send small packets of data between devices — even over slow, unreliable, or low-bandwidth networks. Think of it as a postal system optimised for postcards, not packages. … Read More