Background: At RudderStack, I had been successfully using Postgres for the event streaming use case, scaled to 100k events/sec (note: there were good reasons to choose Postgres over Kafka). Nevertheless, we continue to further explore opportunities to optimize. So I and my team started experimenting with Pulsar (only for the parts of our system - data ingestion specifically). We experimented with Apache Pulsar for ingesting data vs having dedicated Postgres databases per customer (one customer can have 1+ Postgres databases, they would be all master nodes with no ability to share data which would need to be manually migrated each time a scaling operation happens).

Now that it's been quite some time using Pulsar, I feel that I can share some notes about my experience in replacing postgres-based streaming solutions with Pulsar and hopefully learn from your opinions/insights.

----

What I liked about Pulsar:

1. Tenant isolation is solid, auto load balancing works well: We haven't experienced so far a chatty tenant affecting others. We use the same cluster to ingest the data of all our customers (per region, one in US, one in EU). MultiTenancy along with cluster auto-scaling allowed us to contain costs.

2. No more single points of failure (data replicated across bookies): Data is replicated in at least two bookies now. This made us a lot more reliable when it comes to data loss.

3. Maintenance is easier: No single master constraint anymore, this simplified a lot of the infra maintenance (imagine having to move a Postgres pod into a different EC2 node, it could lead to downtime).

----

What's painful about Pulsar:

1. StreamNative licensing costs were significant

2. Network costs considerably increased with multi-AZ + replication

3. Learning curve was steeper than expected, also it was more complex to debug

----

Would love to hear your experience with Postgres/Pulsar, any opinions or insights on the approach/challenges. I hope this dialogue helps others in the community, feel free to ask me anything.