What is Apache Pulsar?

Apache Pulsar is an open-source, cloud-native pub-sub messaging and streaming platform that efficiently handles data movement for various use cases. Originally developed by Yahoo! and contributed to the Apache Software Foundation in 2016, it has been adopted by numerous companies due to its scalability and performance advantages over traditional messaging systems like RabbitMQ and Kafka. Pulsar's multi-layered architecture separates compute (brokers) from storage (BookKeeper), making it easy to integrate with cloud infrastructures and orchestration environments like Kubernetes. It supports various features such as schema registry, geo-replication, IO connectors, tiered storage, multiple subscription types, and advanced messaging capabilities. Pulsar is adept at handling high-volume pub-sub messaging as well as complex messaging patterns typical in a message queuing system. Its adoption rate has been growing rapidly since its open-source release, with an expanding feature set and community support.