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NATS 2.10
This guide is tailored for existing NATS users upgrading from NATS version 2.9.x. This will read as a summary with links to specific documentation pages to learn more about the feature or improvement.
Although all existing client versions will work, new client versions will expose additional options used to leverage new features. The minimum client versions that have full 2.10.0 support include:
For critical infrastructure like NATS, zero downtime upgrades are table stakes. Although the best practice for all infrastructure like this is for users to thoroughly test a new release against your specific workloads, inevitably there are cases where an upgrade occurs in production followed by a decision to downgrade. This is never recommended and can cause more harm than good for most infrastructure and data systems.
Below are a few important considerations if downgrading is required.
2.10.0 brings on-disk storage changes which bring significant performance improvements. These are not compatible with previous versions of the NATS Server. If an upgrade is performed to a server with existing stream data on disk, followed by a downgrade, the older version server will not understand the stream data in the new format.
However, being mindful of the possibility of the need to downgrade, a special version of the 2.9.x series was released with awareness of key changes in the new storage format, allowing it to startup properly.
The takeaway is that if a downgrade is the only resort, it must be to 2.9.22 or later to ensure storage format changes are handled appropriately.
There are new stream and consumer configuration options that could be problematic if a downgrade occurs since previous versions of the server have no awareness of them. Examples include:
- Multi-filter consumers - Downgrading would result in no filter being applied since the new field is configured as a list rather than a single string.
- Subject-transform on streams - Downgrading would result in the subject transform not being applied since the server has no awareness of it.
- Compression on streams - Downgrading when compression is enabled on streams will cause those streams to become unloadable since the older server versions will not understand the compression being used.
- A server reload can now be performed by sending a message on
$SYS.REQ.SERVER.<server-id>.RELOADby a client authenticated in the system account.
- A new
sync_intervalserver config option has been added to change the default sync interval of stream data when written to disk, including allowing all writes to be flushed immediately. This option is only relevant if you need to modify durability guarantees.
- Subject mappings can now be cluster-scoped and weighted, enabling the ability to have different mappings or weights on a per cluster basis.
- The requirement to use all wildcard tokens in subject mapping or transforms has been relaxed. This can be applied to config or account-based subject mapping, stream subject transforms, and stream republishing, but not on subject mappings that are associated with stream and service import/export between accounts.
- A
subject_transformfield has been added enabling per-stream subject transforms. This applies to standard streams, mirrors, and sourced streams. - A
metadatafield has been added to stream configuration enabling arbitrary user-defined key-value data. This is to supplant or augment thedescriptionfield. - A
first_seqfield has been added to stream configuration enabling explicitly setting the initial sequence on stream creation. - A
compressionfield has been added to stream configuration enabling on-disk compression for file-based streams. - A
Nats-Time-Stampheader is now included in republished messages containing the original message's timestamp. - A
tsfield has been added to stream info responses indicating the server time of the snapshot. This was added to allow for local time calculations relying on the local clock. - An array of subject-transforms (subject filter + subject transform destination) can be added to a mirror or source configuration (can not use the single subject filter/subject transform destination fields at the same time as the array).
- A stream configured with
sourcescan source from the same stream multiple times when distinct filter+transform options are used, allowing for some messages of a stream to be sourced more than once.
- A
filter_subjectsfield has been added which enables applying server-side filtering against multiple disjoint subjects, rather than only one. - A
metadatafield has been added to consumer configuration enabling arbitrary user-defined key-value data. This is to supplant or augment thedescriptionfield. - A
tsfield has been added to consumer info responses indicating the server time of the snapshot. This was added to allow for local time calculations without relying on the local clock.
- A
metadatafield has been added to key-value configuration enabling arbitrary user-defined key-value data. This is to supplant or augment thedescriptionfield. - A bucket configured as a mirror or sourcing from other buckets
- A
metadatafield has been added to object store configuration enabling arbitrary user-defined key-value data. This is to supplant or augment thedescriptionfield.
- A pluggable server extension, referred to as auth callout, has been added. This provides a mechanism for delegating authentication checks against a bring-your-own (BYO) provider and, optionally, dynamically declaring permissions for the authenticated user.
- A
slow_consumer_statsfield has been added to the/varzHTTP endpoint providing a count of slow consumers for clients, routes, gateways, and leafnodes. - A
raft=1query parameter has been added to the/jszHTTP endpoint which addsstream_raft_groupandconsumer_raft_groupsfields to the response. - A system account responder for
$SYS.REQ.SERVER.PING.IDZhas been added which returns info for the server that the client is connected to. - A system account responder for
$SYS.REQ.SERVER.PING.PROFILEZhas been added and works even if a profiling port is not enabled in the server configuration. - A user account responder for
$SYS.REQ.USER.INFOhas been added which allows a connected user to query for the account they are in and permissions they have.
- When defining routes between servers, a handful of optimizations have been introduced including a pool of TCP connections between servers, optional pinning of accounts to connections, and optional compression of traffic. There is quite a bit to dig into, so check out the v2 routes page for details.
- A
handshake_firstconfig option has been added enabling TLS-first handshakes for leafnode connections.
- The
NATS_STARTUP_DELAYenvironment variable has been added to allow changing the default startup for the server of 10 seconds
- The
nats-server --signalcommand now supports a glob expression on the<pid>argument which would match a subset of allnats-serverinstances running on the host.
- Prior to 2.10, setting
republishconfiguration on mirrors would result in an error. On sourcing streams, only messages that were actively between stored matching configuredsubjectswould be republished. The behavior has been relaxed to allow republishing on mirrors and includes all messages on sourcing streams.
- A new header has been added on a fetch response that indicates to clients the fetch has been fulfilled without requiring clients to rely on heartbeats. It avoids some conditions in which the client would issue fetch requests that could go over limits or have more fetch requests pending than required.
- Previously, a leafnode configured with two or more remotes binding to the same hub account would be rejected. This restriction has been relaxed since each remote could be binding to a different local account.
- Previously a dot
.in an MQTT topic was not supported, however now it is! Check out the topic-subject conversion table for details.
Last modified 1mo ago