FAQ

The following is a list of frequently asked questions about Natster

How long did it take to make Natster?

It took a team of 3 people 3 weeks to make. An additional week was used to write the documentation, test user flows, find and fix bugs, and generally make it suitable for public use.

🎁 What’s all this talk about prizes?

At Kubecon EU 2024 in Paris, we will be giving away prizes in random drawings to anyone who has successfully imported a shared catalog. We’ll notify the winners by updating a contest.txt file in the synadiahub shared catalog.

Why doesn’t Natster use object stores for the media files?

Given our motto of “Nothin’ but NATS”, it definitely seems like we should’ve used object stores. From a technical standpoint, there’s nothing preventing us from doing this. The main reason why the catalog servers only serve local files is to ensure that none of your private files are ever stored in the cloud, even in your own account. Media libraries can also become incredibly large and it might be easy to go over the free account quota with a big enough object store.

What are all these really long alphanumeric keys?

Throughout the tutorials and your use of Natster as well as Synadia Cloud, you will frequently see keys with 56 characters made up of upper case letters and numbers, like ACTZW5NQGNUQHWDFNPBPROEC4HJO76K7H3QRARK4DWA2P2KBJEHRCUT2. These aren’t just randomly generated bytes. They are actually ed25519 keys that have a special encoding to make them both URL-friendly and double-clickable.

When designing Natster, we decided to use the already secure, decentralized authentication system that comes with NATS out of the box. That choice meant we didn’t have to write our own security tier.

Is Natster a real product? Is it supported?

Natster is a demonstration application. It is an open source reference application created to illustrate a number of powerful design patterns when building distributed systems on top of NATS. While we will of course try and maintain a reliable level of service, there is no guarantee that Natster will continue operating at all times.