Apache Pulsar Versus Apache Kafka

by Chris Bartholomew

For nearly a decade, Apache Kafka has been the go-to publish-subscribe (pub-sub) messaging system—and for good reason. It offers functionality for a wide range of enterprise use cases, along with a large ecosystem of tools and a dedicated community. But lately, upstart Apache Pulsar has been gaining ground. This detailed report explains why.

Apache Pulsar takes the best parts of Kafka and expands on them to solve problems that were out of scope of Kafka’s original design. Author Chris Bartholomew shows you how Kafka and Pulsar compare and where they differ. Engineers and other technical decision makers will learn the advantages that make Pulsar a compelling alternative to Kafka.

Explore the architecture and major components of Kafka and Pulsar
Discover the benefits of Pulsar’s subscription model for messaging
Understand how Pulsar simplifies the messaging system for organizations that need high performance pub-sub messaging, delivery guarantees, and traditional messaging patterns
Learn how Pulsar’s separation of serving and storing makes it natural to run in cloud native environments like Kubernetes
See how Kafka and Pulsar perform on the OpenMessage Project benchmark

ebook

Published December 1, 2019

About the author

Chris Bartholomew is a writer of dark fiction and has over 200 stories in print publications, anthologies, and some online venues. She is head writer for the international print Serial Killer Magazine with over 70 articles in 8 issues. She also has an ezine where she publishes speculative fiction of other writers, entitled: Static Movement.

Reviews

[Vlad Bezden · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are familiar with Kafka, this is the book you want to read. It compares each Kafka feature with Pulsar. I found it to be unbiased. It has enough diagrams and information to understand how Pulsar works, as well as the advantages and drawbacks of each platform.

[SHANOJ V · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read for all Data Engineers!