liftbridge

Liftbridge delivers Kafka-style message streaming with a focus on simplicity and operational ease. Built on top of NATS, it implements a durable, replicated, and scalable message log without the complexity of JVM-based systems like Apache Kafka or Apache Pulsar. The project is written entirely in Go and distributed as a single binary, eliminating dependencies on ZooKeeper and the Java runtime. Key features include: - Kafka-compatible protocol support for producer/consumer semantics - Horizontal scalability with partition-based streams - Configurable replication factors for fault tolerance - Integration with existing NATS deployments to add streaming semantics - High-throughput performance: benchmarks show 200K+ messages/second on a single node - Official Go client (go-liftbridge) with additional language clients available Liftbridge is designed for teams wanting streaming capabilities without operational overhead of traditional platforms. It serves as a lighter alternative for event-driven architectures, log aggregation, real-time analytics, and microservice communication. The system requires Go 1.25.6+ and NATS Server v2.10.0+. Maintained by Basekick Labs with active community support via Discord. Licensed under Apache 2.0. Documentation and quick-start guides available at liftbridge.io.