Excel as an accidental stream processor
Watching a feed, deriving a few values, and firing an alert when something looks off shouldn’t require a Kafka cluster, a JVM, and three days of ceremony. For a lot of problems, it doesn’t. NATS is a natural hub for streaming values: lightweight, subject-routed, no schema enforcement. The missing piece is somewhere to do the computation. It turns out Excel is a left-field but fairly compelling answer. It puts stream processing in the hands of analysts who already know how to use it, without asking them to learn a new framework or become developers overnight....