Streamlio Inc., developer of a commercial publish-and-subscribe platform based upon the open-source Apache Pulsar project, is taking it to the cloud with what it calls a new cloud-native service for fast data.

The offering, which will initially run on top of Amazon Web Services Inc. infrastructure, closely follows the company’s December announcement of a community version of its platform that will be available as a native application for the Kubernetes software container orchestration manager running on Google LLC’s Cloud Platform.

Often considered a rival to Apache Kafka, Pulsar is a publish-and-subscribe messaging platform that provides a way for software applications to communicate with one another and share data in real time. It also helps apps process information faster by eliminating the need to extract, transact and load data first, or by moving it through a data lake or data warehouse, as is normally the case with data analytics.

The platform was developed at Yahoo Inc. to combine high-performance streaming and message queuing into a single model and application program interface. Developers Matteo Merli and Joe Francis said Pulsar was designed for shared consumption, while Kafka was primarily built to support single streams. As such, Pulsar is better for workflow applications involving multiple users, said Jon Bock, Streamlio’s vice president of marketing.

Yahoo ran Pulsar in production for more than three years, processing millions of messages per second across millions of topics for its mail, finance, sports, photo sharing and advertising platforms. Pulsar was donated to the open-source community in 2016 and achieved top-level status last year.

Founded in 2017 by several Pulsar developers, Streamlio has raised $7.5 million in initial funding and released a major update last June.

The company is betting on Pulsar as a better bet than Kafka for a new breed of real-time applications, Bock said. “Kafka’s strength is in aggregating logs, but today people are more interested in ‘internet of things’ data,” he said.

Streamlio said Pulsar’s cloud-native architecture provides superior scalability to Kafka, and its inherent storage capabilities based upon Apache BookKeeper make Pulsar better suited for “a lot of analytic scenarios where you want to play back the history of data. You can transparently leverage cloud storage for long-term and very low-cost storage,” Bock said.

The company said the new cloud-native architecture and performance make Pulsar more accessible to organizations that are adopting real-time data and deployment models, such as software microservices containers.

“Pulsar was designed with serverless computing in mind,” Bock said, referring to a new breed of computing that executes functions based upon programming events without requiring servers to be set up. “It’s very simple for developers to do processing in motion without having to learn new frameworks.”

Customers can quickly sign up for the new cloud service with Streamlio handling configuration, deployment and management, the company said. It didn’t provide specifics on pricing.

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