Free Apache Pulsar Cloud Offered by StreamNative

(Jurik Peter/Shutterstock)

StreamNative, which launched a cloud-based version of Apache Pulsar two months ago, today announced that it’s now offering a free entry-level version of Pulsar in the cloud.

Apache Pulsar is the open source publish-and-subscribe (pub-sub) system that competes with Apache Kafka. The software was originally developed at Yahoo to be a geographically distributed, cloud-native messaging system that delivers large volumes of messages in a durable and low latency manner.

Since Yahoo released it as open source in 2016, Pulsar been adopted by a handful of large companies, including Tencent, Verizon Media, Yahoo Japan, Comcast, Appen, Overstock, and Nutanix.

The most recent adopter perhaps is Splunk, the big machine data analytics firm, which announced last week at its .conf20 event that it has adopted Pulsar as the core technology underlying the latest release of its Splunk Data Stream Processor (DSP), beating out Kafka.

Splunk’s move perhaps was not surprising, considering that it acquired Streamlio, one of the biggest proponents of Pulsar, one year ago. In addition to netting Streamlio’s software, it brought several of the founding members of the Pulsar project into the big data company.

That acquisition created space for StreamNative, another startup founded around Pulsar, to emerge. StreamNative was founded by Siji Guo, who was one of the original developers of Pulsar and Apache Bookkeeper. Guo, who is a PMC member at the Apache Software Foundation, was also one of the founders of Streamlio, but left the company in 2018.

According to Guo, who is also the CEO of StreamNative, the new free cloud offering will remove barriers to giving Pulsar a whirl.

“When we launched StreamNative Cloud’s Hosted offering, we wanted to remove barriers to adoption for Pulsar,” Guo said. “While it was a great fit for companies that were further along in their adoption journey, there was high demand from people who were just getting started. Namely, developers who wanted to try Pulsar without having to put down a credit card or get approvals. The free offering makes this possible.”

According to the terms of StreamNative’s free cloud offering, interested parties can get a Pulsar cluster with a 1GB of data up and running free of charge, with just a few clicks. The cluster. which runs on Google Cloud, is limited to 100 topics and a throughput of 1 MBps.

It’s not a large cluster, by any means, but it’s free and it lets people get started with Pulsar quickly, which is the whole point. And if customers are happy, they can upgrade to a larger and more capable Pulsar cluster.

StreamNative is developing its Apache Pulsar stack for stream processing (Image courtesy StreamNative)

StreamNative, which has offices in Beijing and San Francisco, launched its StreamNative Cloud offering in August 2020 to provide users with a simple, fast, reliable, and cost-effective hosted Pulsar experience. While Pulsar itself streamlines infrastructure and operations compared to other technologies in the space, “operating a production-grade often requires time and effort that many teams would rather allocate to addressing core business needs,” the company says.

One of the first company’s running on StreamNative Cloud is the Chinese company Bestpay. Weisheng Xie, the chief data scientist at Bestpay, said this about StreamNative’s offering: “With StreamNative Cloud, we are now able to launch a resilient, secure, and scalable event streaming service within minutes. It’s straightforward and extremely easy to use, which greatly boosts the efficiency of our engineering team,” Xie said.

Computing categories benefit from competition, and while Kafka has enjoyed remarkable success as a core message buys, Pulsar looks ready to give it competition. As one of the only independent providers of Pulsar services, StreamNative is a company worth keeping an eye on.

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