Synadia and the NATS project

When I first created NATS, I imagined a world where developers wouldn’t have to trade performance for simplicity. 15 years later, I’m impressed by how far we’ve come and how much further we can go.

As we look to the future, NATS will continue to thrive as a CNCF project under the Apache 2.0 license with continued support from Synadia. Beginning this year, we’re adopting a regular 6-month release cycle to bring more predictability and transparency to the roadmap. You can preview what’s coming in the NATS 2.12 milestone on GitHub.

Synadia had been considering an enterprise fork of the NATS Server under the Business Source License (BSL). We believed that a BSL version of the server, combined with an exception for non-production use and an automatic reversion to Apache 2.0 after two years, provided an acceptable balance between delivering for our customers and still maintaining our commitments to the open source community.

While other details and terms of the license for the forked repository had not been fully established, we wanted to avoid creating vendor lock-in and to reassure the community that they would also benefit from these changes after a reasonable amount of time.

We have received a tremendous amount of feedback from our customers, partners and the ecosystem since our internal thinking on a potential fork came to light. We are extremely appreciative of everyone who was willing to talk with us (both publicly & privately) to share their thoughts and concerns with us. It shows how critical NATS has become to so many innovative developers and companies globally.

On the commercial side, Synadia remains committed to building enterprise-grade capabilities that extend open source NATS. Our focus in 2025 will center on three key areas:

1. Security – Launching this summer, our Security Gateway for NATS will combine protocol and content inspection, policy enforcement, rate limiting, and rich metrics and reporting.

2. Observability – We are investing in deeper insights and traceability across distributed systems to support enterprise-grade monitoring and debugging.

3. Operations – We’re building tools that simplify the deployment and lifecycle management of large scale, cloud-to-edge systems.

This roadmap is shaped by real-world customer input, partner collaboration, ecosystem feedback, and R&D innovation. Our goal is to make the Synadia experience the easiest, most powerful way to operate with NATS in production at scale.

Driving a commercial business around OSS can be challenging, and we recognize how important it is to avoid uncertainty in a thriving OSS project like NATS. Input from the wider community, including our customers and partners, suggests this strategic direction will best benefit both the NATS ecosystem and Synadia customers and partners.