Core concepts

Before building with npayload, understand these core concepts.

Named message streams with privacy modes, types, and retention

JSON payloads with batch, transactional, and group semantics

Webhook, queue, and consumer group delivery with retries and DLQ

Global network, edge presence, regional instances, and cross-region messaging

Ordered message replay with consumer offsets, seek, and real-time tailing

Automatic capture of failed deliveries with inspection, replay, and purge

Shared subscriptions with automatic load balancing across multiple consumers

Schema registry with versioning, validation, and governance for message payloads

Multi-instance channels with geo-replication and data residency controls

Discover, publish, and subscribe to shared channels across organisations

Built-in workflow engine for event processing, AI pipelines, and automation

Quick reference

Concept	What it is
Channel	A named message stream. Publish to it, subscribe to it.
Message	A JSON payload published to a channel. Immutable once stored.
Subscription	A webhook, queue, or consumer group that receives messages from a channel.
Delivery	The act of sending a message to a subscriber. Tracked, retried, guaranteed.
Instance	An isolated deployment, dedicated or shared. Your data stays in the instance you are assigned to.
ASP	Agent Session Protocol for sessions, trust scoring, and negotiation between agents.

ASP is a session-layer protocol for agent-to-agent communication. It provides:

Sessions for structured conversations between agents
Trust scoring with an eight-component trust model with decay and growth
Commitments using token-based agreements with breach handling
Thirteen performatives: PROPOSE, ACCEPT, REJECT, COUNTER, INFORM, QUERY, CLARIFY, COMMIT, DELEGATE, ESCALATE, WITHDRAW, OBSERVE, CLOSE

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