If you're running modern distributed applications, you're likely familiar with the trade-offs between ease of use and operational control.
On one side, there's the simplicity and convenience of fully-managed cloud services like Synadia Cloud. On the other, there's the granular control and security of self-hosting and managing your own infrastructure via enterprise solutions like Synadia Platform.
For NATS users, navigating this trade-off often leads to another challenge: NATS on Kubernetes.
Users want to secure and control their data plane, so they self-host NATS and Synadia Platform. But they struggle with the complexity, operational overhead, and time-consuming manual tasks required to operate NATS on Kubernetes.
That's where Synadia Deploy for Kubernetes comes in.
It's a self-service, bring-your-own Kubernetes workflow that delivers the best of both worlds: the simplicity of a managed solution with the control and flexibility of running on your own infrastructure.
We believe it's the simplest and fastest path to a NATS deployment that's both:
- yours to control, customize, and extend
- easy to deploy, operate, and upgrade (without a PhD in k8s)
If you want to get the most out of NATS, Deploy for Kubernetes includes all the components of Synadia Platform - NATS itself, Control Plane, HTTP Gateway, Connectors, Workloads - plus a support SLA.
And if Kubernetes isn't your thing, don't worry—it's just the first deployment target. Our broader vision for Synadia Deploy is to make NATS operations simple and seamless across heterogeneous environments of all shapes and sizes, whether cloud, on-premises, or at the edge.
Why We Built Deploy for Kubernetes
Over the past year, we've observed three different profiles of organization among current and potential NATS users:
- Startups and fast-moving teams who want fully-managed simplicity - They choose Synadia Cloud so they can get started in minutes and never worry about NATS infrastructure.
- Organizations with specific infrastructure or security and compliance requirements - They opt for our self-hosted Platform, so they get complete control. But, they need to have the skills and resources to handle deployment and operations themselves.
- A growing middle ground, who want to have their cake and eat it too - They want more control than Synadia Cloud offers, but less complexity than fully self-hosting Synadia Platform.
Let's run through a few "middle ground" mindsets where Deploy for Kubernetes is a strong fit.
"We need to run NATS in our VPC to minimize egress charges."
With Deploy for Kubernetes, you can deploy NATS and Synadia Platform anywhere Kubernetes runs, including in your VPC alongside your applications to avoid egress charges.
"Our security team requires single-tenant deployments."
With Deploy for Kubernetes, your NATS cluster runs on your infra. It's only neighbors are your own applications.
"We want to deploy to on-prem or edge locations where we already run Kubernetes."
With Deploy for Kubernetes, you're not limited to the hyperscalers' data centers. Deploy to k8s clusters in your own data center, on your local machine, or on devices at the edge, including k3s, k0s, k3d, and more.
"We avoid self-hosting because we often struggle with and fall behind on upgrades."
With Deploy for Kubernetes, upgrades aren't scary or error-prone, so you won't delay them, even if the engineer who originally deployed your NATS cluster has moved on.
"We love Synadia Cloud's simplicity, but not its usage limits."
With Deploy for Kubernetes, your usage is only limited by what your infrastructure can handle. Of course, you can still set your own limits, e.g. per account or per user.
How It Works
The deployment flow is simple:
- From Synadia, deploy our lightweight agent via Helm to your Kubernetes cluster
- The agent establishes a secure connection back to Synadia
- Configure your deployment through our Control Plane interface
- The agent receives the configuration and automatically creates all deployments in your Kubernetes cluster
- Your NATS cluster, along with any configured Workloads, Connectors, or HTTP Gateways, springs to life
The entire process typically completes in under 5 minutes, and ongoing management—including upgrades—follows the same streamlined approach. Control Plane will nudge you to stay on top of upgrades and, over time, we'll introduce automated health checks and alerts, based on the battle-tested best practices of our support engineers.
What's included
Using Deploy for Kubernetes to spin up a new 3-node or 5-node NATS cluster gives you access to all the capabilities of Synadia Platform, including:
- A production-ready NATS cluster (running the latest patch releases of 2.10 or 2.11 - you choose)
- Control Plane: the unified interface for configuring, operating, and monitoring your NATS deployment (the only component that runs in our environment, not yours)
- Connectors: bridges for moving data between NATS and external systems (including out-of-the-box connectors for MongoDB, AWS, Azure, & GCP)
- Workloads: NATS-native distributed compute, so you can deploy containers or JS functions anywhere NATS runs
- HTTP Gateway: make familiar HTTP calls to NATS endpoints to fetch data or invoke services
Deploy for Kubernetes also includes our Standard Support SLA, which guarantees a next business day response time for support tickets and gives access to our team of NATS maintainers and experts.
Focus on building, not plumbing
Deploy for Kubernetes occupies a middle ground in the spectrum of our delivery models. It's for teams who need some or all of:
- the operational simplicity of a managed solution
- the control of running on their own infrastructure
- the predictable network costs (no egress charge bill shock)
- the ability to meet specific compliance or data residency requirements
- the flexibility to deploy NATS close to their applications or at the edge
Ultimately, Deploy for Kubernetes aims to simplify the deployment of NATS and Synadia Platform. Making it far easier to deploy and operate NATS on Kubernetes is a part of that story, but not the most important part.
What we really care about is letting you and your team focus on building your distributed applications, not your plumbing.
Whether you're prototyping locally, deploying to edge locations, or running in a cloud VPC, you can now fast-forward to building and shipping your applications - and innovating for your business - all backed by the full power of NATS and Synadia Platform.
Ready to get started? Begin your 14-day Deploy for Kubernetes trial and deploy your cluster.
FAQ
What's the pricing model for Deploy for Kubernetes?
Deploy for Kubernetes is $1,250/month for a three-node NATS cluster and $2,000/month for a five-node cluster.
What if I need more than 5 nodes or a higher level of support?
If you need more than 5 nodes, a higher level of support, please contact us with more details on your use case.
Can I use Deploy for Kubernetes with my existing NATS cluster?
Today, Deploy for Kubernetes requires creating a new NATS cluster.
How does my deployment of NATS and Synadia Platform communicate with Synadia Control Plane?
Along with NATS Server and the Synadia Platform components, a component called Private Link is also deployed, which creates a tunnel to Control Plane.
The Private Link tunnel enables secure communication between your data plane and Control Plane for cluster management operations (i.e. creating accounts, users). Keys associated with these entities are generated and stored in Synadia's environment. Metrics for monitoring the performance of your cluster are also sent to and persisted in Control Plane. Check out the docs for more details.
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