Why consider Pulsar?
Apache Pulsar was designed to address the limitations of Apache Kafka, especially in a cloud-native environment. More and more teams are turning to Apache Pulsar, as an alternative to Kafka, for its scalability and enterprise-grade features.
Additionally, Kafka applications can run on Pulsar. StreamNative Cloud supports the native Apache Kafka protocol on Pulsar brokers.
Success!
Rene Laplaine, Director of Technology Development and Engineering at Intelcom
Made for the Cloud
Advantages of Apache Pulsar
Pulsar’s design allows organizations to elastically scale storage independently from compute and achieve different levels of resource isolation. In contrast, Kafka has a monolithic architecture that tightly couples compute and storage, where resources must be scaled together.
Kafka relies on multiple brokers to receive the data. In the event of a node failure, the partition on that broker will be lost. If a Pulsar broker fails, it will lose the ownership of the partition it held before, the information of which is stored in ZooKeeper. For the entire Pulsar cluster, a broker failure is not a significant issue, as another broker can quickly take over.
Pulsar handles data reads and writes differently than Kafka by writing data to memory as a write-ahead log and then asynchronously and sequentially writing data to the journal disk. This provides transactional management and ensures data durability, allowing for a fast rollback in case of issues.
StreamNative Cloud supports the native Apache Kafka protocol on Pulsar brokers. It means you can migrate your existing Kafka applications and services to Pulsar without modifying the code. This enables Kafka applications to leverage Pulsar’s powerful capabilities.