While RabbitMQ is not a “never again” for me, I agree that making it work reliably does involve a few knobs and architectural tricks. I have been using AMQP/Rabbit/Kafka previously (in that order), and switched to Pulsar where I can since 2017 ( https://stackoverflow.com/a/47477765 ).

It has been great overall.

So good I have recently decided to slow down client work and build a managed SaaS offering for Pulsar: https://turtlequeue.com It is a work in progress, however it is a bit different from the nascent Pulsar offerings out there.

The main goal are ease of use and being cheap. How do I go about it?

1. Behind the scenes there is only one pulsar cluster. This lowers the costs of hosting dramatically. Even the smallest production pulsar cluster requires:

  - ZooKeeper node(s)
  - Bookies nodes
  - Brokers node(s)
  - (optional) Function workers node(s)
  - (optional) Proxies node(s)
  - Pulsar Manager
  - Prometheus
  - Grafana

.. typically this runs on top of kubernetes these days, so throw in volume storage and a LoadBalancer. Hosting small setups is costly. By having a shared cluster I can lower the costs enough to provide a free “try me” service at little to no cost to me. And nobody will suffer from the “noisy neighbour” as Pulsar is designed to be multi-tenant and can enforce limits per tenant.

2. Tq (turtlequeue) users do not have to care about how the cluster operates (typical SaaS). It is also dramatically easier for me to monitor and operate only one cluster.

3. How do I expose this safely and make it easy for users to use Pulsar then? Experienced Pulsar users will notice that this is not easy to do at the moment with pulsar. I am developing a custom proxy! This in turns allows me to collect metrics/enforce finer permissions, present a nicer dashboard.

Where am I now? The custom proxy works, the website/docs/login/dashboard/metrics/pricing need a lot of TLC. So “soon”. I will be looking for beta testers, if you are interested please email turtle@turtlequeue.com Feel free to email me too if you just want to be kept in the loop :)

user:	turtlequeue
created:	November 26, 2019
karma:	3