Apache Pulsar vs Kafka: Rethinking the Message Broker — Part 1
Introduction Kafka has been the default choice for event streaming for over a decade. It earned that position — it solved real problems at LinkedIn-scale when nothing else could, and the ecosystem built around it is massive. If you are building a new system today and someone says “use Kafka,” that is not bad advice. But it is incomplete advice. Apache Pulsar was created at Yahoo in 2013 to solve problems that Kafka’s architecture made structurally difficult: multi-tenancy across thousands of topics, independent scaling of storage and compute, and geo-replication as a first-class feature rather than an afterthought. It was open-sourced in 2016 and became a top-level Apache project in 2018. ...