NATS vs. Valkey for the Reference Fan-Out

Not financial advice. Verify claims independently.

The two pub/sub contenders for the reference implementation — benchmarked.

For the reference architecture's fan-out layer, two candidates:

	NATS	Valkey (Redis OSS fork)
Latency	Sub-ms, excellent	Sub-ms, excellent
Persistence	JetStream (opt-in)	AOF/RDB
Ordering	Per-subject	Per-channel
Ops complexity	Low (single binary)	Low (single binary)
Maturity	CNCF, proven	New fork, Redis-compatible

The pick: Valkey for Stock Picks's deployment — Redis familiarity, already deployed. NATS for the reference docs — slightly cleaner fan-out semantics for the reader.

Both survive the Micron-burst test. The choice is operational preference, not correctness.