NGS as an infrastructure bridge

NGS is a global communications system built on top of NATS. Think of it as a universal, public "dial tone", that you can use to connect any endpoint to any other endpoint in the world, all without ever opening an internal firewall port.

When you combine the power of NATS leaf nodes with the ability to connect to a global network of NATS infrastructure through a single URL, the possibilities grow exponentially.

For example, any time you need to connect multiple disparate infrastructures that are not open to each other through a secure tunnel, you can simply use NATS leaf nodes at the edge of each infrastructure that use NGS as a bridge. The NGS security context remains completely isolated from the security context(s) of your application. It's also worth pointing out that NATS supports web sockets as well, giving you access to wasmCloud host runtimes that are running in a browser. In fact, our JavaScript host runtime relies on web sockets for its NATS access.

Effectively, this gives you the ability to control traffic segmentation and the "interest graph" of the various nodes connected within a lattice, but as far as the lattice (and its control interface) are concerned, everything is just a single, flat topology.

Lattice with NATS and NGS really is the best of all worlds: a layered, optimized, hierarchical security and traffic flow topology hidden behind a single, flat control interface.