NATS

We have deployed NATS on our infrastructure as a message broker to communicate between our different services.

Its deployment configuration is located in the nats-deploy repository on GitHub and details about the deployment are described there.

Connecting to NATS

NATS is exposed to the rest of the cluster via a service object simply called nats inside its namespace. This means that connections are possible via the hostname associated to that service, e.g. nats.nats-dev.svc.cluster.local.

NATS Hostname

nats.nats-dev.svc.cluster.local but dev can also be stage or prod to use that NATS instance instead.

Interactive Session from inside the Cluster

kubectl supports running one-off pods in the cluster. We use this capability to run a nats-box pod and use the installed tools there.

1	`kubectl run -it --rm nats-box --image=natsio/nats-box`

You can now verify the server connection by running:

1	`nats -s nats.nats-dev.svc.cluster.local server check`

Port-Forwarding to local computer

kubectl supports port-forwarding arbitrary services to your local computer.

The following command port-forwards the port named nats-client on the service named nats inside the namespace nats-dev.

1	`kubectl -n nats-dev port-forward svc/nats nats-client`

You can now verify the server connection by running:

1	`nats -s localhost server check`

Last update: 2022-10-04