Apache Pulsar vs Apache Kafka - How to choose a data streaming platform

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  • Apache Spark

    Apache Spark - A unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing

  • Both Kafka and Pulsar provide some kind of stream processing capability, but Kafka is much further along in that regard. Pulsar stream processing relies on the Pulsar Functions interface which is only suited for simple callbacks. On the other hand, Kafka Streams and ksqlDB are more complete solutions that could be considered replacements for Apache Spark or Apache Flink, state-of-the-art stream-processing frameworks. You could use them to build streaming applications with stateful information, sliding windows, etc.

    Both Kafka and Pulsar provide some kind of stream processing capability, but Kafka is much further along in that regard. Pulsar stream processing relies on the Pulsar Functions interface which is only suited for simple callbacks. On the other hand, Kafka Streams and ksqlDB are more complete solutions that could be considered replacements for Apache Spark or Apache Flink, state-of-the-art stream-processing frameworks. You could use them to build streaming applications with stateful information, sliding windows, etc.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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  • bookkeeper

    Apache BookKeeper - a scalable, fault tolerant and low latency storage service optimized for append-only workloads

  • Is it possible to store data within Kafka and Pulsar? The answer is yes, both systems offer long-term storage solutions, but their underlying implementations differ widely. While Kafka uses logs that are distributed among brokers, Pulsar uses Apache BookKeeper for storage.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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