Apache Pulsar is an open source pub-sub messaging/streaming platform, competing in a similar space with Apache Kafka. It provides expected functionality — such as low-latency async and sync message delivery and scalable persistent storage of messages — as well as various client libraries. What has excited us to evaluate Pulsar is its ease of scalability, particularly in large organizations with multiple segments of users. Pulsar natively supports multitenancy, georeplication, role-based access control and segregation of billing. We're also looking to Pulsar to solve the problem of a never-ending log of messages for our large-scale data systems where events are expected to persist indefinitely and subscribers are able to start consuming messages retrospectively. This is supported through a tiered storage model. Although Pulsar is a promising platform for large organizations, there is room for improvement. Its current installation requires administering ZooKeeper and BookKeeper among other pieces of technology. We hope that with its growing adoption, users can soon count on wider community support.
