NATS on Edge - A Distributed Industrial Mesh

NATS is a versatile messaging system with a sweet spot in distributed and edge deployments. It supports multiple communication patterns, can replace REST services without firewall modifications, and enables message stream replication across locations while maintaining security barriers.

This talk presents Schaeffler's implementation, which spans over 100 plants globally with multiple clusters processing billions of messages daily from thousands of clients. More than 50 custom applications—including AGVs, edge devices, distributed apps, and a central SAP system—utilize NATS for data transmission.