django-nats-nkeys VS spec

I'm in the process of migrating PrintNanny.ai's remote command/event system off Cloud IoT Core. I've been running on IoT Core for 1.5 years. Here's my breakdown of the costs...

- $236.99 in usage, approx 1% of project's total revenue

- ~20 hours to implement pub/sub applications running on a mix of Raspberry Pi & GCP VMs. Implementations were in Rust and Python. It would have taken much, much longer to stand up a managed MQTT broker and identity/key management that I felt comfortable using in my own home, let alone providing to customers.

- Hundreds of hours implementing and debugging glue between GCP's Pub/Sub product, websocket-based subscribers, and MQTT subscribers/publishers.

I don't regret my decision (wouldn't have shipped otherwise), but I'm looking forward to the next phase. Here's what I'm migrating towards:

- NATs message broker. NATS supports connections via MQTT and Websocket protocols, besides NATS own protocol.

- django-nats-nkeys for org, identity, and JWT management (not production-ready, don't use this until I've been eating my own dog food for a few months) [1]

- AsyncAPI schemas [2] for core message APIs, including schemas for 3rd-party printer software events (OctoPrint, Moonraker, Repetier, etc). This will underpin PrintNanny's plugin system.

[1] https://github.com/bitsy-ai/django-nats-nkeys

[2] https://www.asyncapi.com/

AsyncAPI: Interested in how to define your WebSocket APIs? One of the most advanced realtime specifications is the AsyncAPI specification, which comes with various generators for code and documentation, as well as renderers for the specifications.

Our journey with FastStream started when we needed to integrate our machine learning models into a customer's Apache Kafka environment. To streamline this process, we created FastKafka using AIOKafka, AsyncAPI, and asyncio. It was our first step in making message queue management easier.

Automatic Docs: Stay ahead with automatic AsyncAPI documentation

FastStream supports in-memory testing, AsyncAPI schema generation and more... If you are interested, please support our project by giving a GH start and joining our discord server.

However, in order for the system to work effectively, there must be a common understanding between the components regarding events and their data structures. This is where AsyncAPI comes in; it helps define a contract that describes how the components communicate and behave effectively.

You can also take a look at https://www.asyncapi.com/ (a spec for asynchronous APIs). It's useful for this use case, that is, building a well structured websocket interface with pub/sub.

Sure! Next step I am working on AsyncAPI scheme generation by your application code. It's also includes a project generation from scheme, scheme web view (lika the Swagger for OpanAPI), etc. It will a much difficult than just another broker implementation...

Onboarding - Enable developers to quickly learn how to consume the exposed APIs. For example, offer OpenAPI or AsyncAPI documentation and provide a portal and sandbox.