Happenings in the Apache Pulsar Neighborhood Feb. ‘22

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Apache Pulsar Neighborhood

5 min readFeb 5, 2022

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For this issue, a new PMC member, 2 new committers, a call to help improve the quality of the code, a meetup in Italian, and a new and improved home page coming soon. Plus our normal features of a Stack Overflow question and some monthly community stats.

New PMC Member

For the second month in a row, the Apache Pulsar PMC announced a new member. Lari Hotari of DataStax was invited to join the PMC and accepted. Lari made his first contribution in April 2020 and since then, he has been involved in more conversations and has made more contributions than any other Neighbor. His most recent high profile contribution was for the Log4j where many technology press outlets picked up and reported on his tweets and Github testing applications. We want to thank Lari for all of his hard work and dedication to the Apache Pulsar project.

New Committers

The PMC also announced the addition of two new committers, Zhangjian He of Huawei and Haiting Jiang of DiDi.

Zhangjian made his first contribution almost 2 years ago in March of 2020. Since then, he has contributed in some manner over 500 times.

Haiting Jiang made his first contribution to Pulsar about 8 months ago and since then has been one of Pulsar’s most prolific contributors. He is also a committer to RocketMQ.

Thank you to both of you for your hard work over the last couple of years and we look forward to seeing what you contribute going forward.

Call to Action

Are you new to Apache Pulsar Neighborhood or have been here for awhile and are looking to learn how the internals of Apache Pulsar actually work? Well, Lari has put out a call for help working on Pulsar’s Flaky tests. By helping out finding issues with the tests, you will be digging deep into the code to get a great understanding of it. To learn more, read Lari’s post on the dev@ mailing list.

Approaching Milestone

Slack approaching 6k

In November, we passed 10k stars on Github, which was pretty amazing (Currently at 10,328). And as 2022 starts, we are about to pass 6k members on Slack. At the time of this writing we are at 5,951 with an average of about 60 new members a week (which is also growing). So very soon we will pass 6,000. If you are not on our Slack, you are missing out. Last week we had 592 messages, which was up over 20% from the previous week. To join the conversations, go to the Pulsar Contact page and follow the link to the Pulsar Slack Workspace. While there, you can also sign up for the official dev@ and user@ Pulsar mailing lists.

New and Improved Website Coming Soon

A group of our neighbors has been working hard to improve the Apache Pulsar home page. The complete redesign of the site should be completed soon and will correspond with the upgrade of the documentation. If you would like to catch a sneak peek of the new site and what is being discussed, visit the website channel of the Pulsar Slack workspace.

Upcoming events…

February has been a little quiet for our meetups with only one schedule at the moment. The Bologna Java Users Group is going to host some of our Italian neighbors on 24 Feb. more details will be posted on our Neighborhood Meetup page.

The quietness does make for a great opportunity to go over to our YouTube channel and check out the events that have already happened. Also, we have playlists of our neighbors at other events. To be the first to learn when we post our next event, go to our Meetup page and follow it.

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 neighborhoods. You can ask questions at both locations and get answers 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. 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. So to promote our great Stack Overflow channel, we thought that we would find a good question and include it here in Happenings.

For this month’s question, we thought that we would go back and highlight an older question. Question: Let’s say for that one has a Pulsar Producer for a persistent topic topic1 (namespace and tenant are not relevant for the question).And let’s say we have multiple consumers for the same topic (topic1) with different subscription names.Is it possible to configure the consumers to receive same message? So for example if message msg1 is sent to the topic both consumer1 and consumer2 receive this message? Both consumers and producer are written in Java but programming language is not important.

It has two good answers already, plus a link to a blog that goes into more detail, so it is a great way to learn a little bit more about Pulsar. While there, take a moment and see if you can answer one of the open questions.

Stats of the Month

For January, we had 81 contributors making 392 contributions, with 21 of those contributors making their first contribution. We also had just under 3k conversations from 293 different people. This is about 10% more interaction in January than in December and more than double the engagement a year ago in January 2021, it just shows how much the community is growing. Plus we now have over 5,900 members on our Slack channel!

#ApachePulsar is growing

We have seen #ApachePulsar appearing in some new places. We asked that Meetup add it as a tag that you can add to your events and they just created the tag. Also, we have see #ApachePulsar appear on Peloton, so if you are part of that community, add in #ApachePulsar and ride with others from the neighborhood. If you have seen #ApachePulsar somewhere new, please let us know.

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. Or to see more, plus presentations, go here.

Proven: Starlight for JMS Can Send One Million Messages Per Second

Using Apache NiFi with Apache Pulsar For Fast Data On-Ramp

Kafka or Pulsar? A Battle of the Giants Concerning Streaming

Taager’s Foray in Messaging Part 1; Apache Kafka vs. Apache Pulsar

Auto-Scaling Pulsar Functions in Kubernetes Using Custom Metrics