NATS has reached graduated status at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a step that puts its messaging software in a category the foundation calls stable and ready for production use.
CNCF said more than 2,000 companies use NATS, including NVIDIA, Walmart, AT&T, Capital One and PayPal. The software carries messages between distributed applications and services. Core NATS handles live delivery, while JetStream can retain streams for later access; NATS documentation also lists at-least-once delivery, key-value storage and object-store tools among JetStream’s features.
NATS entered CNCF at the Incubating maturity level on March 15, 2018. The foundation’s project page dates its move to graduated status to Nov. 2, 2026, after the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) approved the change. CNCF announced the graduation Nov. 10 at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America. Its process for changing a project’s level includes an application review and public comment before the TOC votes.
A security audit by Trail of Bits was facilitated by the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF), with CNCF support. OSTIF reported 10 findings when it published the results April 18, 2025: three medium, one low and six informational. OSTIF said the project had resolved or accepted all of them by then.
CNCF’s announcement dates technology consultancy Sophotech’s adoption of NATS to 2025. In a case study published by NATS and Synadia, Sophotech said its 99th-percentile latency went from about 150 milliseconds to about 40 milliseconds. The company also reported that weekly operations time fell from several hours to less than one hour.
The NATS roadmap targets March 2027 for Server 2.16. Planned features include checksums for stored data, automatic data repair and incremental stream backups; the roadmap says its scope may change.
