Pulsar

Streaming Data Platforms: Kafka, Pulsar, and Beyond Streaming data platforms help teams publish and consume a steady flow of events. The two most popular open-source options are Apache Kafka and Apache Pulsar. Both store streams and support real-time processing, but they approach the problem with different design goals. Kafka focuses on a durable log with broad ecosystem support, while Pulsar separates storage and compute, offering strong multi-tenant capabilities and built-in geo-replication. ...

Real-Time Data Processing with Streaming Platforms Real-time data processing helps teams turn streams into actionable insights as events arrive. Streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, and cloud services like AWS Kinesis are built to ingest large amounts of data with low latency and to run continuous computations. This shift from batch to streaming lets you detect issues, personalize experiences, and automate responses in near real time. At a high level, a real-time pipeline has producers that publish messages to topics, a durable backbone (the broker) that stores them, and consumers or stream processors that read and transform the data. Modern engines like Flink, Spark Structured Streaming, or Beam run continuous jobs that keep state, handle late events, and produce new streams. Key concepts to know are event time versus processing time, windowing, and exactly-once or at-least-once processing guarantees. Light load with stateless operations is simple; stateful processing adds fault tolerance and requires careful checkpointing. ...