SALT LAKE CITY -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 that NATS, the open source messaging and streaming system, has graduated. NATS unifies messaging, streaming and state in a single system that connects services, devices and AI agents across cloud, on-premises and edge environments.
NATS uses asynchronous messaging that does not depend on where a service runs, so applications can exchange messages without tightly coupling senders to receivers. Its JetStream capability adds persistence, along with key-value and object-store features. The project entered CNCF at the Incubating level in March 2018 and now counts 6,377 contributors from 1,674 organizations, more than 400 million downloads and over 2,000 companies using it, including NVIDIA, Walmart, AT&T, Capital One, Mastercard and PayPal.
“As organizations scale distributed systems and AI agents, reliable communication between workloads is critical to operational success,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. “NATS’s graduation solidifies it as a production-ready messaging and streaming layer, giving teams the operational consistency they need to connect everything from microservices to edge devices.”
Security Audit and Roadmap #
To graduate, NATS completed a third-party security audit by Trail of Bits, facilitated by the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund (OSTIF), earned the OpenSSF Best Practices badge and documented a vendor-neutral governance model in which each organization gets one vote. NATS integrates with Kubernetes through Helm charts and the NACK operator, and works with Prometheus, Dapr and wasmCloud. NATS Server 2.16, targeted for March 2027, will add on-disk checksums and automatic self-healing of damaged data across cluster servers, improved cluster stability and incremental JetStream stream backups.