Direct#

The Direct Subject is the basic way to route messages in NATS. Its essence is very simple: a subject sends messages to all consumers subscribed to it.

Scaling#

If one subject is being listened to by several consumers with the same queue group, the message will go to a random consumer each time.

Thus, NATS can independently balance the load on queue consumers. You can increase the processing speed of the message flow from the queue by simply launching additional instances of the consumer service. You don't need to make changes to the current infrastructure configuration: NATS will take care of how to distribute messages between your services.

Example#

The Direct Subject is the type used in FastStream by default: you can simply declare it as follows

@broker.handler("test_subject")
async def handler():
...

Full example:

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from faststream import FastStream, Logger
from faststream.nats import NatsBroker

broker = NatsBroker()
app = FastStream(broker)

@broker.subscriber("test-subj-1", "workers")
async def base_handler1(logger: Logger):
    logger.info("base_handler1")

@broker.subscriber("test-subj-1", "workers")
async def base_handler2(logger: Logger):
    logger.info("base_handler2")

@broker.subscriber("test-subj-2", "workers")
async def base_handler3(logger: Logger):
    logger.info("base_handler3")

@app.after_startup
async def send_messages():
    await broker.publish("", "test-subj-1")  # handlers: 1 or 2
    await broker.publish("", "test-subj-1")  # handlers: 1 or 2
    await broker.publish("", "test-subj-2")  # handlers: 3

Consumer Announcement#

To begin with, we have declared several consumers for two subjects: test-subj-1 and test-subj-2:

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@broker.subscriber("test-subj-1", "workers")
async def base_handler1(logger: Logger):
    logger.info("base_handler1")

@broker.subscriber("test-subj-1", "workers")
async def base_handler2(logger: Logger):
    logger.info("base_handler2")

@broker.subscriber("test-subj-2", "workers")
async def base_handler3(logger: Logger):
    logger.info("base_handler3")

Message Distribution#

Now the distribution of messages between these consumers will look like this:

    await broker.publish("", "test-subj-1")  # handlers: 1 or 2

The message 1 will be sent to handler1 or handler2 because they are listening to one subject within one queue group.

    await broker.publish("", "test-subj-1")  # handlers: 1 or 2

Message 2 will be sent similarly to message 1.

    await broker.publish("", "test-subj-2")  # handlers: 3

The message 3 will be sent to handler3 because it is the only one listening to test-subj-2.