Data-Friendly Messenger Apache Pulsar Gains Market Traction

Open source messaging system Apache Pulsar was promoted from incubator status to a top-level project as its data-friendly platform gains market traction.

Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced at ApacheCon North America in Montreal that Pulsar graduated to top-level project status after gestating in its Apache Incubator since June 2017. ASF is a Maryland-based non-profit that supports over 350 open source Apache software projects, including the popular Web server software Apache HTTP Server.

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With a goal of simplifying customers’ data pipelines, Pulsar’s open source distributed publish-and-subscribe messaging system aims to provide a low latency, high scalability platform that can run on commodity hardware. Pulsar involves lightweight compute and connector frameworks that enable clients to quickly process data while serving as a unified platform for a wide set of use cases.

An Infoworld.com article said Pulsar has emerged from its incubation stage with distinct advantages over messaging competitor Apache Kafka on several fronts, including lower latency and faster throughput. As well, Pulsar’s robust and streamlined operational features were cited as giving the platform an advantage over the more cumbersome and resource-heavy Kafka.

“The last year has seen the evolution of Pulsar from its original messaging core into an integrated platform for data in motion,” said Apache Pulsar VP Matteo Merli. “With the graduation, we hope to take the Apache Pulsar project and community to the next level and to reach a wider set of users and contributors, with the ultimate goal of building a strong ecosystem.”

Several high-profile names that have bought into the Pulsar ecosystem include MercadoLibre, STICorp, One Click Retail, Zhaopin.com, Yahoo Japan Corporation, and Oath.

“At Oath we run Apache Pulsar at scale across many major products — including Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports and Oath Ad Platforms — and in multiple data centers across the globe, with full mesh replication,” said Oath Storage and Messaging Director Joe Francis. “Pulsar will continue to be an integral part of our tech stack, in streaming and also as a bridge between public and private clouds in our hybrid cloud strategy.”