Notable Deed
Narad
Durable messages. Timeless connections.
A message broker that respects your weekend: plain HTTP in, at-least-once out, and nothing to babysit in between. Built over a year to learn distributed systems properly, then soaked, crashed, and drilled until the evidence caught up with the design. v1.0 shipped in July 2026; the forge is still lit.
Enchantments
Durable before acknowledged
A 202 means the message is fsynced to disk, not buffered, not "probably". Crash a millisecond later; it survives.
Built to say yes
Availability first: any live node accepts your produce and routes around dead partition owners. Machines burn; messages land.
No consumer groups
No rebalancing storms, no generation IDs. Scale consumers by starting more consumers; that’s the whole runbook.
The whole API fits on a screen
Plain HTTP and curl. No client library to vendor, no binary protocol to debug at 3am.
One binary, one Helm chart
Raft lives inside the same binary. No ZooKeeper, no keeper of any kind. If you can run a StatefulSet, you can run Narad.
Replication in one API call
A fan-out child placed on different nodes than its parent: an async full copy that survives the parent’s disk.
Proven in the Field
300M+
messages soaked through a live five-node cluster, reconciled in a ledger
0
messages lost across soaks, chaos runs, and a free 15-minute VPN outage
47.5h
final soak window: 170.9M messages at 1,000 msg/s, four produce retries
50k/s
sustained full-flow throughput; the load generator gave out first
Plus a chaos matrix of kill -9s and mid-write restarts, backup/restore with a measured recovery point, a mixed-version rolling upgrade, and live scale-out from three nodes to five under traffic, all against a real Kubernetes deployment, not a laptop.
The Honest Fine Print
A 1.0 is defined by what it refuses to claim: ordering is not guaranteed (carry a sequence in the payload if you need one), replication is opt-in async disaster recovery rather than transparent failover, and partition rebalancing hasn't shipped yet. The docs say all of this in bold, not in a footnote.
The Quest Chain
The build was chronicled in three journal entries (design, lessons, and proof):