Why r-nacos Could Replace Nacos: A Low‑Memory Rust Service Registry for Microservices

r-nacos Introduction

r-nacos is a Rust‑based Nacos service that provides the same registration and configuration center functions as Alibaba's Nacos, but with lower memory consumption and excellent performance.

mall-swarm Project Overview

mall-swarm is a microservice e‑commerce system (11k+ stars) built with the 2024 latest microservice stack, including Spring Cloud Alibaba, Spring Boot 3.2, JDK 17, Kubernetes, etc., and integrates core components such as registry, config, monitoring, and gateway.

GitHub: https://github.com/macrozheng/mall-swarm

Gitee: https://gitee.com/macrozheng/mall-swarm

Video tutorials: https://cloud.macrozheng.com/video/

Installation

r-nacos supports Windows exe installation and Docker installation; the example uses Docker.

Pull the Docker image: docker pull qingpan/rnacos:stable Run the container:

docker run --name rnacos -p 8848:8848 -p 9848:9848 -p 10848:10848 -d qingpan/rnacos:stable

Access the console at http://192.168.3.101:10848/rnacos/ with default credentials admin:admin.

Project Practice

Using the mall‑swarm e‑commerce project as an example, the following steps integrate r‑nacos.

Clone the mall‑swarm code and modify bootstrap-dev.yml to point the Nacos address to r‑nacos.

spring:
  cloud:
    nacos:
      discovery:
        server-addr: http://192.168.3.101:8848
      config:
        server-addr: http://192.168.3.101:8848
        file-extension: yaml

Add mall-admin-dev.yaml to r‑nacos configuration list.

Start the mall‑admin module; the service appears in r‑nacos service list.

Repeat for other modules; all services become visible.

Access the online API documentation via the gateway at http://localhost:8201/doc.html.

Start the front‑end projects mall-admin-web and mall-app-web; they can call APIs through the gateway.

Additional Features

r‑nacos also provides user management, data migration, and system monitoring functions.

User Management – add or modify users.

Data Migration – import/export configuration data.

System Monitoring – comprehensive runtime status monitoring.

Performance Benchmark

Official benchmark results show r‑nacos has excellent performance with very low memory usage.

Comparison with Nacos

Compared with Alibaba's Nacos, r‑nacos reduces memory consumption from about 900 MB to less than 10 MB, making it suitable for resource‑constrained servers.

Conclusion

Using the mall‑swarm project, we demonstrated that r‑nacos can fully replace Nacos while offering much lower memory usage and strong performance.

Project Repository

https://github.com/nacos-group/r-nacos