Pulsar vs SQS
Today there is a need for massive and scalable pub-sub messaging platforms, as more and more companies require distributed streaming applications and queuing. For a long time, Apache Kafka was the only messaging platform software.
Everyone used it, and it was a standard for these kinds of operations, so nobody thought better solutions were possible. However, in the world of open-source and data, there are always new things coming along. Pulsar and SQS are modern and powerful distributed messaging tools, but which one is best for your company?
Today we will talk about two younger solutions for distributed messaging, including Apache Pulsar and Amazon SQS. We will go over their designs and how they fare against each other for different uses.
What is Pulsar
Apache Pulsar is an open-source, streaming, distributed messaging, and cloud-native platform that daily manages billions of information events. It was initially created by Yahoo and used within their messaging system for various applications like Flicker, Yahoo email, Yahoo Finance, etc.
In 2016 it was offered as open-source software and was included in the Apache Foundation two years later. Pulsar started growing quickly in popularity after it went open-source because developers and companies could see its advantages over Kafka.
Pulsar has Higher throughput
The design of Pulsar allows it to give high throughput and low latency at all times. It is achieved by storing messages and separating messages between consumers and creators. The multi-tier architecture to store messages in Apache BookKeeper and serve them through brokers.
Instead of creating its own storage layer, Pulsar relies on BookKeeper. This distributed log can store messages for a long time. Even when the data volumes are at their highest, there is no latency for writing or reading.
Pulsar has Multi-tenancy
When you have higher performance and low latency within a messaging system, sharing it with all the groups and teams working on it is essential. Instead of trying to replicate the system to avoid confusion between teams, Pulsar hives true multi-tenancy.
In other words, all teams can share the system without issues. All the users (tenants) have their policies, authorization, and authentication methods they can use. On top of that, all the tenants can also get different namespaces.
A single tenant can have different environments like production, staging, testing, or development.
Pulsar Provides Geo-replication
Geo-replication is the ability of Pulsar to replicate messages to distant locations. This functionality lets applications work globally on a large scale while supporting recovery. Geo-replication allows applications to be connected to clusters locally while sending messages and receiving them from remote clusters.
It’s one built-in functionality of Pulsar. If a message is published in a replicated namespace, it will be replicated automatically to all the remote locations that have been set up. There is no need for any add-ons or complicated configurations, and everything is executed instantly.
Pulsar has Tiered storage
The multi-layered architecture offers another advantage – the ability to add new layers. All high-performance messaging systems require state-of-the-art disks for writing messages and retrieving them.
However, the problem is keeping old messages for event sourcing or replaying them. That is why Pulsar has tiered storage so that you can store these old messages cheaply. Pulsar uses S3 buckets to retrieve old messages with lover performance but at a lower cost as well.
What is SQS
Amazon Simple Queue Service is a cloud computing messaging service for storing messages. It allows developers to run services and business applications without relying on IT infrastructure. You can run all the messages independently to avoid any faults, disturbances, or slow speeds.
Probably the most significant benefit of SQS is that it sends encrypted messages through the servers. It reduces the risks associated with sending messages within the cloud environment. It’s often used in healthcare, banking,https://abyskincare.com, and other industries.
SQS has Unlimited throughput and scalability
SQS uses AWS cloud for on-demand scaling. There’s no need to worry about pre-provisioning or capacity planning. SQS has no limit on standard queues, doesn’t have a throughput limit, and queues can have as many messages as the user wants.
At the same time, this service is paid per usage, reducing costs considerably, so teams will have to pay only when they scale and expand their system.
SQS Provides Lower costs
All the underlying infrastructure and operations for this message queuing service are managed and maintained by AWS. There are no upfront costs when using SQS, installations, configurations, or the need to build your infrastructure.
All the queues are created quickly and scale automatically, allowing organizations to build and expand their applications while remaining efficient quickly.
SQS Encryption
Amazon SQS is great for sharing sensitive business data between services or applications. It uses server-side encryption to protect each message. With the combination of SQS SSE and AWS Key Management Service integration, all the keys can be managed contrary to protected messages.
Pulsar vs SQS: Which one to choose?
There isn’t a clear winner between these Pulsar vs SQS. After all, both are significantly better than Kafka and other message queuing services that were dominant in the past. They’re both very reliable and simple to use.
Lots of people use Pulsar as an open-source alternative to SQS. Pulsar also gives more flexibility in terms of organization and setting up applications.
On the other hand, SQS is more out-of-the-box with reliability and scalability. Even though Pulsar has fewer users, there is no risk of vendor lock-in, and you can always improve your processes.
Bottom line
Even though Pulsar doesn’t offer support and security like SQS, managed services for Pulsar such as Pandio can give you these added benefits. In other words, open-source is quickly moving forward and providing all the traditional benefits along with innovative solutions and flexibility.