RethinkConn 2025 Proved Virtual Events Can Be Exceptional — Here's What's Coming in 2026

Every year, the NATS community comes together for one event that sets the agenda for the year ahead. No sponsor booths. No overproduced keynote theater. Just engineers, architects, and builders going deep on the technology that powers the world’s most demanding distributed systems.

That event is RethinkConn — and on Thursday, June 4, 2026, it’s back for its biggest edition yet. → Register free for RethinkConn 2026

Before we look forward, it’s worth looking back. RethinkConn 2025 delivered one of the most substantive virtual conferences in the NATS community’s history. Here’s what made it special — and why 2026 is shaping up to be even better.

What RethinkConn 2025 Delivered

The 2025 edition featured 16 sessions spanning customer stories, engineering deep dives, product launches, and a forward-looking keynote from Derek Collison, NATS creator and Synadia CEO. Attendees heard directly from practitioners at companies across financial services, clean energy, industrial IoT, gaming, and cloud infrastructure.

If the event had a single throughline, it was this: the shift from cloud-native to edge-native computing is not a trend — it’s an architectural reckoning. Collison set the stage in his keynote:

“As much as the rules shifted and changed as we made a shift from data center to cloud and cloud native, there’ll be an even bigger transition to edge native.”

— Derek Collison, Creator of NATS & CEO, Synadia

Customer Stories That Made It Real

The talks that resonated most weren’t demos in a vacuum — they were practitioners sharing hard-won lessons from production systems.

PowerFlex — a clean energy company managing EV charging, solar, and storage across customer sites — built its entire edge-to-cloud architecture on NATS JetStream. With roughly 500 leaf nodes deployed in parking garages and industrial sites with unreliable connectivity, the team needed guaranteed delivery even when the internet dropped:

“The one really appealing feature of NATS JetStream is the automatic sends, or the guarantees of sends, even when the Internet connection goes out. That’s become extremely useful time and time again. The internet is bad at most of our sites.”

— Robert Hughes, Engineering Manager, PowerFlex

MachineMetrics connects thousands of edge devices at hundreds of manufacturing customer sites, providing real-time production intelligence from factory floor machinery. Their team landed on NATS for a reason that goes beyond raw performance — it uniquely decouples where data is addressed from where it’s accessed:

“NATS is the only technology in the space that really decouples the addressing of data from the access point of data. That separation is an absolutely unique and powerful feature in NATS that is underappreciated. Once you use it, it leads to a very free architecture and high resiliency.”

— Jochen Rau, Data Platform Engineering Manager, MachineMetrics

You can explore all 16 sessions from RethinkConn 2025 — including the full keynote, product talks, and community sessions — on the 2025 recap page.

What Attendees Said

RethinkConn 2025 wasn’t just well-attended — it was well-received. The feedback told a clear story about what the NATS community actually wants from a conference:

“This was by far the best online software conference I’ve attended.”

“Not an overproduced sales pitch. The format worked extremely well.”

“Thanks for a great conference with a lot of Q&A. Great that it was mostly about architecture and use cases!”

“Love how fast this conference is moving along! I get bored easily otherwise.”

“NATS has saved me lots of time! All my components talk to each other nicely and happily.”

RethinkConn 2026 is your chance to be part of that conversation. Secure your spot now — it’s free.

What’s New for RethinkConn 2026

This year, RethinkConn builds on everything that worked in 2025 — and adds something new. Launching the week after the conference, Synadia is releasing a set of training workshops, with early access exclusively for live attendees.

That means attending live isn’t just about the sessions — it’s your earliest path into hands-on NATS education, designed to take the architectural concepts from the conference directly into your own systems.

The format stays the same: half a day, fast-paced, deeply technical, globally accessible. No travel required. No registration fee. Just as NATS acts as the central nervous system of distributed systems — carrying signals across every layer, connecting every node — RethinkConn is where the people behind those systems come together to think, learn, and build.

Whether you’re new to NATS and exploring what it can do, or you’ve been running it in production for years and want to know what’s coming next — RethinkConn 2026 is built for you.