// the find
superstreamlabs/memphis
Memphis.dev is a highly scalable and effortless data streaming platform
Memphis is a NATS-based message broker that adds a developer-friendly layer on top of JetStream: schema enforcement, a web UI, dead-letter queues with auto-retry, and per-message observability. It targets backend developers who want Kafka-grade streaming without the operational complexity. The company behind it pivoted to a cloud product (Superstream) and officially abandoned this repo — the README says so in the first line.
Built on NATS/JetStream means the core throughput and clustering story is solid and battle-tested. The Schemaverse (Protobuf/JSON/Avro/GraphQL enforcement at the broker level) is a genuinely useful feature that most self-hosted brokers leave to clients. Dead-letter queue with automatic retransmit is implemented at the broker layer, not bolted on in application code. SDK coverage is wide — Go, Python, Node, .NET, Kotlin, Rust — with a feature parity matrix that's honest about gaps.
Officially unmaintained — the company walked away to build a competing cloud product, which means no security patches, no bug fixes, and a slow death. The license is 'Memphis Business Source License 1.0', not Apache 2.0 — you can't use it as a hosted service or compete with Superstream, which quietly rules out a large class of production use cases. The Java SDK is effectively a stub with most features missing or marked unknown. Last push is March 2026 but the project was already in wind-down mode well before that.