Happenings in the APN Oct. ’21 dot 2
Hello Everyone,
For this issue, we have a new committer, links to a lot of new events, links to just completed events, new website voting, and a new feature, so let’s get to it.
David Kjerrumgaard named a committer
At the end of September, David Kjerrumgaard was named as a committer for the project. David has been a great contributor to the neighborhood by answering a lot of questions on the Slack and Stack Overflow channels. He has numerous tutorials on a wide variety of topics on how to use Apache Pulsar. And next month, his book, Apache Pulsar in Action comes out. So please join us in congratulating David on becoming a committer and for all of the other great work he does for the neighborhood. To see a full list of committers and PMC members, go to our Team page on the Apache Pulsar website.
New Website Voting
Speaking of the website, Melissa Logan and her team from Constantia have been working on some new designs for the Apache Pulsar home page. These are mock-ups, so the content and copy will be updated before the page is released, but they will give you a good idea of the proposed look and feel of the new page. We are encouraging everyone in the neighborhood to take a moment and look over the proposals and then reply on the dev@ mailing list with your preference(s). Here is a link to the email.
Upcoming events…
Coming up on October 27th, Apache Pulsar neighbor Rob Morrow speaking at the IoTHub Meetup Group. He will be talking about how to get faster performance by using Apache Pulsar, Apache Arrow, and custom hardware without the need to send things to the cloud. Thus allowing your system to take in messages and process them at IoT scale, which is important for ML and AI models . On November 10, Rob will be doing a similar talk, but focusing more on the Open Source side at the NorCal Meetup group.
On 17 November Jowanza Joseph will be speaking at the Netherlands Apache Pulsar Meetup, about Apache Pulsar IO. Jowanza is a great speaker and very knowledgeable about all things Pulsar, to the point that he, too, has a book coming out called Mastering Apache Pulsar: Cloud Native Event Streaming at Scale.
Encrio Olivelli will be speaking on December 21st (12:00 PST) at the Seattle Java Users Group about Apache Pulsar. From the abstract: In this session you will see how to use Pulsar in a JakartaEE Web Application deployed on Apache TomEE via the JMS/EJB API, without installing any additional components to your cluster.
Would you and some colleagues like to set up a Neighborhood Meetup group or maybe you have someone who you would like to hear speak at a future meetup? Let us know and we can give you some help. Visit us at our Neighborhood Meetup page or our slack channel #meetup and ask questions.
Great questions from the Apache Pulsar Stack Overflow
As you know, we have a very active slack and Stack Overflow neighborhood. You can ask questions at both locations and get answers pretty quickly. Slack does have two big weaknesses. One, it is limited to the number of messages that can be saved at about 10k and we hit the limit about every three months. So we lose the question and its answer(s). Two, it is not searchable by Google. Thus, when you put the error message that you received into Google, you won’t see that the question has already been answered once or twice on Slack. Stack Overflow doesn’t have these issues. So to promote our great Stack Overflow channel, we thought that we would find a good question and include it here in each issue of Happenings.
Question: In Apache Pulsar topic documentation it says can we set a topic time retention policy to -1 for infinite time based retention, What are the downsides of having infinite retention and can we use pulsar as [a] message store where data lives forever in topics and build event sourcing application around them?
Follow the link above to get the answer. Do you have some learnings to add to the answers?
Completed Events
September and early October were full of events in the neighborhood, with the big events being ApacheCon at Home and Pulsar Summit Europe. ApacheCon has posted their videos and we have made a playlist of the Apache Pulsar content on the Neighborhood YouTube channel. In the list, you can see talks by Ming Luo, Matteo Merli, Lari Hotari, and Timothy Spann
Pulsar Summit Europe, which was a full day of talks on Pulsar, has been completed. Obviously, all of the talks are about Pulsar, so we don’t have the room to list the names of all of the speakers, but the replays will be available soon. We will link to the replays on the Apache Pulsar webpage as soon as they are posted.
Stats of the Month
September ends the 3rd quarter of 2021 (wow time is going fast). In the first three quarters of the year, we have had over 21k conversations on Slack and Stack Overflow from 1,100 unique people. Plus we have had over 3k commits from 325 unique people, including 16 new contributors in September.
Apache Pulsar in the News
Here are some blog posts that we have found from around the web. We think that they are good, but we might not have read them all. Let us know what you have written and we will share it. Post links on our blogs-articles channel on the Apache Pulsar Slack.
On the internals of Stream Processing Systems — Pretty Technical on how Stream Processing systems work.
Apache Pulsar and Apache Druid get close…
The Critical Role Streaming Plays in a Data Stack
