A journey to Deploy Pulsar on Cisco's Cloud Native IoT Platform

Deploying Pulsar to a large scale distributed and cloud native production environment can be very challenging as each use case has its own specific requirements and currently is implemented in a "snowflake" "approach". Cisco IoT Control Center is one of the largest IoT platform in the world with multiple data centers across continents running thousands of applications to manage hundreds of millions of IoT devices such as connected cars and wireless phones. This talk describes the 2-year journey to modernize this platform into a cloud native GitOps platform where Pulsar is replacing legacy message queue services and is deployed to multiple Kubernetes clusters. We will present the main steps taken in this journey to go from the stock StreamNative distribution of Pulsar to a fully automated deployment of Pulsar and describe how the implemented solution:

• integrates with the CI/CD pipeline to allow seamless and fast Pulsar upgrades from the time a new release is available to rolling upgrades on test and production clusters using FluxCD,
• addresses security requirements with Istio and JWT
• addresses disaster recovery requirements by deploying active
• active Pulsar clusters configured with geo-replication
• integrates with the cloud native platform infrastructure (NAS, PKI, DNS, Secret Management, Monitoring...)
• contributes to dramatic performance improvement, operational overhead and OPEX reduction

This Session recording was originally presented at Pulsar  Summit North America 2023.