StreamNative: Enabling Real-time Messaging and Streaming for the Cloud

As the CEO of StreamNative, it’s been an exciting ride so far, and today we are proud to share that we’ve raised a $23M series A round. For us, this funding underscores the increased adoption of StreamNative and Apache Pulsar that we are seeing in the market and a bright future ahead.

In celebrating this milestone, we’d like to look back at how our Pulsar journey began. More than 10 years ago Matteo and I were at Yahoo! working to develop a consolidated messaging platform that connected all the popular Yahoo! Applications, including Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, Flickr and more, to data. At the time we looked at the existing messaging and streaming technologies, but they were not able to provide the scalability, reliability, and features needed to meet today’s modern architecture and application requirements.

The team at Yahoo! set out to build a cloud-native messaging service that would work for the global enterprise. We built Pulsar from the ground up to handle millions of topics and partitions with full support for geo-replication and multi-tenancy. Pulsar was open sourced by Yahoo! in 2016 and became a top-level Apache Software Foundation in 2018.

Over the past several years there has been a huge market shift from applications and traditional services using monolithic messaging services - either running on-premise, or simply ported to the cloud - to truly cloud-native applications designed to leverage the cloud and Kubernetes. This shift to the cloud and containers has amplified the spotlight on Apache Pulsar.

Apache Pulsar is unique in that it provides an all-in-one platform with unified messaging and streaming capabilities built for the cloud. Think about it as the combination of Kafka (streaming only) and RabbitMQ (messaging only), designed for multi-tenancy and containers.

At StreamNative, we work to help organizations around the globe successfully adopt Pulsar. StreamNative builds upon the powerful Apache Pulsar platform with two product offerings, StreamNative Cloud and StreamNative Platform, details below:

1. StreamNative Cloud provides Apache Pulsar-as-a-service and delivers a resilient and scalable messaging and event streaming managed service deployable in minutes (alleviating the need to spend time or resources to deploy, upgrade, or maintain clusters).
2. StreamNative Platform is a self-managed cloud-native offering that completes Apache Pulsar, providing a unified messaging and streaming platform powered by Apache Pulsar with advanced capabilities to help accelerate real-time application development and to simplify enterprise operations at scale.

We’re excited to see the growth in the Apache Pulsar and StreamNative communities. When we started this journey Kafka was the dominant player in the space, but Pulsar’s rapid adoption since it became a top level Apache Software Foundation project in 2018 has been remarkable.

In fact, the number of monthly active Apache Pulsar contributors surpassed Apache Kafka recently (see graph below)! Many have adopted Apache Pulsar because it offers the potential of faster throughput and lower latency than Apache Kafka, along with a compatible API that allows developers to switch from Kafka to Pulsar with relative ease.

We are proud to continue to support the Apache Pulsar community through events, training, project updates, and project contributions. In fact, members of the StreamNative team often represent more than half the monthly Pulsar contributors. We also play a key role sponsoring and hosting the global Pulsar Summits (next being Pulsar Summit Europe 2021 in October).

What’s next? StreamNative will continue to focus on advancing the state-of-the-art in streaming, stream storage, and messaging technologies. From real-time microservices that use Pulsar’s pub/sub features and streaming storage for real-time analytics to infinite storage for deep analysis, we’re all about innovating on Pulsar’s flexible architecture and industry leading feature-set to deliver new capabilities.

And, we’re hiring! We’re growing our global staff across all departments to accelerate product development, ecosystem expansion, and customer acquisition. If you’re interested in joining the StreamNative team and building a platform based on Apache Pulsar to enable companies to manage the entire lifecycle of data, contact us.