1 Introduction to Apache Pulsar

Developed at Yahoo in 2013, Pulsar was first open sourced in 2016, and only 2 years after joining the Apache Software Foundations’ incubation program graduated to Top Level Project status. Apache Pulsar was designed from the ground up to address the gaps in current open source messaging systems such as multi-tenancy, geo-replication, and strong durability guarantees.

The Apache Pulsar site describes it as a distributed pub-sub messaging system that provides very low publish and end-to-end latency, guaranteed message delivery, zero data loss, and a serverless lightweight computing framework for stream native data processing. Apache Pulsar provides the three key capabilities for processing large data sets in real-time:

1.1      Enterprise Messaging Systems

1.1.1      Key Capabilities

1.2      Message Consumption Patterns

1.2.1      Message Queuing

1.2.2      Publish-Subscribe Messaging

1.3      The Evolution of Messaging Systems

1.3.1      Generic Messaging System

1.3.2      Message Oriented Middleware

1.3.3      Enterprise Message Bus

1.3.4      Distributed Messaging Systems

1.4      Comparison to Apache Kafka

1.4.1      Multi-Layered Architecture

1.4.2      Message Consumption

1.4.3      Data Durability

1.4.4      Message Acknowledgement

1.4.5      Message Retention

1.5      Why Do I Need Pulsar?

1.5.1      Guaranteed Message Delivery

1.5.2      Infinite Scalability

1.5.3      Resilient to Failure

1.5.4      Support for Millions of Topics

1.5.5      Geo-Replication and Active Failover

1.6      Real World Use Cases

1.6.1      Unified Messaging System

1.6.2      Microservices Platform

1.6.3      Connected Car

1.6.4      Fraud Detection

1.7      Additional Resources

1.8      Summary