StreamNative's 2020 Year in Review

2020 was a difficult year as individuals, communities, and organizations around the world were faced with the challenges of the global pandemic. While many of the plans and expectations for 2020 had to be put on hold, we were impressed with the resilience of the Pulsar community and its commitment to finding new ways to connect and collaborate.

The challenges we faced last year have made us even more grateful for the Pulsar community and the growth and advancements we were able to achieve together. We'd like to take some time to share some of the highlights from 2020.

Events Recap

With in-person events on hold, we endeavored to connect and serve the community in the digital space. We held the first-ever (and second-ever) global Pulsar Summit, shared weekly project updates and monthly webinars with partners, launched a Pulsar training program, and much more. Below are some of the highlights from the 2020 events:

1. Pulsar Summit Virtual Conference 2020 (North America)
2. Pulsar Summit Asia 2020
3. TGIP (Thank Goodness It's Pulsar) Weekly Project Updates
4. StreamNative Webinar Series

Pulsar Community Growth

In spite of the challenges, the Apache Pulsar community continued to be engaged and witnessed strong growth in 2020. From new and returning contributors to the Pulsar project, to Slack member conversations, to the speaker, sponsor, and attendee participation at the Pulsar Summits, the Pulsar community showed its commitment to the project.

• 340+ Pulsar Contributors (with 150+ new contributors in 2020 alone)
• 7,000+ Github Stars
• 2,500+ Pulsar Slack Members
• 80 speakers and 1,600 attendee sign ups across 2 global conferences

Pulsar Project Announcements

We had two major project releases (Apache Pulsar 2.6 and 2.7) and made some major additions to the Pulsar ecosystem. Most excitingly, we launched StreamNative Cloud, providing Apache Pulsar as a Service, a turnkey solution to help organizations get up and running on Pulsar and to ensure their success. You can find out more about each below:

• Pulsar Ecosystem Updates
• Announcing StreamNative Hub
• Announcing "Kafka on Pulsar" (KoP), Bringing the Native Apache Kafka Protocol Support to Apache Pulsar, Open-Sourced by StreamNative and OVHCloud Open-Sourced
• Announcing "AMQP on Pulsar" (AoP), Open-Sourced by StreamNative and ChinaMobile
• Announcing "MQTT on Pulsar" (MoP), Brings the Native MQTT Protocol Support to Apache Pulsar
• Apache Pulsar 2.6, including support for large message sizes, namespace change events, and more.
• Apache Pulsar 2.7, including transaction support, topic level policy, and more.
• Announcing StreamNative Cloud - the Only Fully-Managed Apache Pulsar Offering

Top Engineering Blog Posts

In 2020, we worked with the community to develop educational content to help developers and devops teams adopt and implement Pulsar. Below are the top 10 blogs and success stories from 2020:

1. How Apache Pulsar is Helping Iterable Scale its Customer Engagement Platform
2. Apache Pulsar Helps Tencent Process Tens of Billions of Financial Transactions Efficiently with Virtually No Data Loss
3. Benchmarking Pulsar and Kafka - A More Accurate Perspective on Pulsar's Performance
4. Pulsar vs Kafka Report
5. Pulsar vs Kafka Report - Part 1
6. Pulsar vs Kafka Report - Part 2
7. Powering Federated Learning at Tencent with Apache Pulsar
8. How Apache Pulsar Helps Streamline Message System and Reduces O&M Costs at Tuya Smart
9. Why Zhaopin Chooses Pulsar SQL for Search Log Analysis
10. Why we moved from Apache Kafka to Apache Pulsar
11. What's New in Pulsar Flink Connector 2.7.0
12. Announcing: The Apache Pulsar 2020 User Survey Report

Looking Forward to 2021 News and Events

While the world continues to heal from the pandemic and looks ahead to a brighter future, we are excited to share some upcoming news and events. We hope you can join us!

2021 Events

We are building on the momentum of last year and launching a number of new events to help support the Pulsar community. See below for details:

• TGIP Pulsar Updates by StreamNative, held monthly. Sign up here.
• TGIP Pulsar Office Hours by StreamNative, held monthly. Sign up here.
• Professional Training - Fundamental, Developers, and Operations, held quarterly. Upcoming Fundamentals, sign up here, Developers, sign up here.
• Local Meetups: Coming up in March, Uber + StreamNative host this year's first Pulsar Bay Area meetup with speakers from Uber, Facebook, Splunk, and Ververica.
• Three Global Pulsar Summits - North America, Europe, and Asia. North America CFP coming soon.
• Pulsar Hackathon, May 6th and 7th. Details coming soon. (Contact info@streamnative.io with any questions.)
• StreamNative's monthly webinars continue!
• You can sign up for TiDB + Pulsar, Event Streaming Architecture in Action, on Tues, Feb. 23rd
• You can view the January webinar, Watch Your Streams: Implementing OpenTelemetry with Apache Pulsar

Roadmap and Announcements

StreamNative will continue to broaden the capabilities of both Pulsar and StreamNative Cloud in 2021. Continue reading for a sneak peek at some of the exciting projects we will deliver this year:

• Pulsar + Flink: An Improved Flink integration and a managed Flink offering in StreamNative Cloud.
• Function Mesh: Launching in Q1 2021, this will allow teams to manage a group of functions.
• Expansion of StreamNative Cloud: Currently available on AWS, GCP, and Alibaba cloud, we will also launch on more cloud providers, including Microsoft Azure.

About StreamNative

Founded by the original developers of Apache Pulsar, the StreamNative team is committed to the Pulsar community and to helping the community successfully adopt and deploy Pulsar. As the core developers of Pulsar, the StreamNative team is deeply versed in the technology, the community, and the use cases, and has experience operating Pulsar in large scale production environments, including at both Twitter and Yahoo!. The StreamNative team's unmatched operational experience on Pulsar and Bookkeeper is now available to you through StreamNative Cloud.

We are hiring! Join Our Team.

Stay Connected

There are a number of ways you can stay connected in the Pulsar Community:

1. Subscribe to the Pulsar Newsletter by StreamNative, a monthly update of all things Pulsar and the Pulsar community. Join the mailing list here.
2. Join the Pulsar Slack Channel here.
3. Get started on StreamNative Cloud!