DDS

DDS (Data Distribution Service) is an Object Management Group standard for real-time, data-centric publish/subscribe messaging. Instead of routing messages through a central broker, DDS builds a decentralized “global data space” where publishers and subscribers discover each other automatically and exchange typed data samples directly. It is engineered for the mission-critical and industrial systems where latency, reliability, and predictability are non-negotiable.

• Data-centric pub/sub - Participants communicate through named, typed data topics rather than opaque message payloads.
• Quality-of-Service policies - Fine-grained QoS controls durability, reliability, latency budgets, and delivery guarantees per topic.
• Decentralized discovery - Nodes find one another dynamically with no central broker, avoiding a single point of failure.
• Real-time by design - Deterministic delivery makes DDS a fit for robotics, defense, autonomous vehicles, and industrial control.

In practice, DDS underpins systems where a request/response API would be too slow or too brittle — the internal fabric of robots, medical devices, and IoT platforms — and increasingly those fabrics are fronted by REST or streaming APIs for external integration. As standards like AsyncAPI bring event-driven interfaces into the broader API discipline, DDS represents the high-assurance end of that spectrum, and understanding it helps teams reason about where message-centric protocols end and web-facing API contracts begin.