📄️ Overview
Coordination is the process by which nodes in a distributed system exchange information, maintain consistency, and respond collectively to changes within the cluster. In the context of Stalwart, coordination ensures that each server instance remains aware of the state of the others, allowing the cluster to behave as a unified system even when composed of many independent nodes.
📄️ Peer-to-Peer
Peer-to-peer coordination is a decentralized approach to cluster communication in which each node communicates directly with its peers, without relying on a central coordinator or external messaging infrastructure. This model offers simplicity and autonomy, making it especially attractive for small to medium-sized deployments where minimizing operational complexity is a priority.
📄️ Apache Kafka / Redpanda
Apache Kafka is a high-throughput, distributed event streaming platform designed for publishing, subscribing to, storing, and processing large volumes of real-time data. It is widely used in distributed systems to enable reliable communication between services, particularly in environments where durability, scalability, and fault tolerance are critical.
📄️ NATS
NATS is a lightweight, high-performance messaging system designed for cloud-native and edge environments. Built for simplicity, speed, and scalability, NATS provides a publish-subscribe model that enables services to communicate in real time with minimal latency and overhead. It is well-suited for distributed systems that require fast, reliable event propagation without the operational complexity of more heavyweight platforms like Apache Kafka.
📄️ Redis
Redis is an in-memory data structure store commonly used for caching, session storage, and ephemeral key-value data. While it is best known for its performance as a high-speed cache, Redis also includes native support for publish/subscribe (pub/sub) messaging, which can be used for lightweight inter-process or inter-node communication.