Apache Pulsar : Is it a KAFKA Killer?

I’m sure many of us must be bit surprised after reading the TITLE.
I agree. Why to use this new component ?

Kafka is pretty much stable now and accepted by a wide range of Organizations which shows its worth. Now the question comes to mind, What are the new features or capabilities which Kafka doesn’t offer you but Apache Pulsar does!
I would say almost nothing, but it doesn’t mean there is nothing new. There are signifiant differences and certain new features while we compare Kafka to Apache Pulsar.

I found a good post on comparison of Pulsar vs Kafka. To get more detail, please refer the post- https://streaml.io/blog/pulsar-streaming-queuing/

Now the Next Question that comes to mind is-

WHY should we choose Apache Pulsar over Kafka?

Apache Pulsar is a Enterprise Edition of PubSub, Originally developed by Yahoo and now supported by Apache Software Foundation. Apache Pulsar is running on Production systems from last more than 3 years and proved it’s stability.

Apache Pulsar covers almost all the features which Kafka offers us, may be with diferent names. Pulsar has many features but I would like to highlight some of them which will help us to differentiate with Kafka -

1} Apache Pulsar gives you 3 types of subscription over the topic:
A} Exclusive
— Only one consumer will consume the data from a Topic
B} Shared
— Multiple Consumer will consume the data from a Topic
C} Failover
— More than one Consumer but at a given point of time only one will consume the data.

2} Each namespace can have one or more topics

3} Strong support for Multitanency

4} Data replication over multiple cluster

5} Strong message durability support against data loss

On top of this we all know PubSub has strong support of google and it’s community, which might interest you to choose Apache Pulsar over the Kafka. I see both the components stable and capable enough to handle message consumption.

Time to decide what will you choose, Let me know your thoughts!!