Comparing Dattell & StreamNative
Choosing the right Apache Pulsar Partner

Apache Pulsar has emerged as a powerful alternative to traditional messaging systems, offering features like multi-tenancy, geo-replication, and seamless scalability. As organizations evaluate managed Pulsar service providers, two names often come up: Dattell and StreamNative. While StreamNative is frequently associated with the origins of Pulsar, it’s essential to look beyond affiliations and assess which provider aligns best with your operational goals.

To start, this table highlights several of the important components of the managed Pulsar services offered by Dattell and StreamNative. We will go into more detail in the paragraphs below.

Understanding the origins: StreamNative and Apache Pulsar

It’s accurate that key figures behind StreamNative, such as Sijie Guo and Matteo Merli, were instrumental in developing Apache Pulsar during their tenure at Yahoo! . However, the open-source nature of Pulsar means that its development and optimization have been a collective effort from a global community. Relying solely on the creators for managed services is akin to choosing a car manufacturer for all maintenance needs—expertise is widespread, and alternatives often offer better value.

Fee structure considerations

StreamNative’s pricing structure includes variable license fees, cloud service fees, and potential surcharges for services like SME support. These costs can escalate quickly, especially for organizations with variable workloads.

In contrast, Dattell offers consistent, flat-rate pricing without hidden fees, ensuring that organizations can budget effectively without unexpected charges.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

StreamNative offers an uptime SLA for some, but not all, managed service plans. Some plans can include a 99.95% uptime SLA for single AZ deployments. While these figures are commendable, it’s essential to consider the real-world implications:

Downtime allowance: Even a 0.05% downtime equates to over 21 minutes per month.
Support response: The quality of support during these downtimes is crucial.

Dattell prioritizes rapid response times (<15-minutes) and proactive monitoring, aiming to minimize downtime and ensure swift issue resolution, thereby enhancing overall system reliability. And Dattell provides a 99.99% SLA for all engagements.

Dattell's advantages

Expertise: Dattell’s team comprises seasoned professionals with extensive experience in deploying and managing Pulsar in diverse environments. We’ve been providing fault tolerant, highly optimized managed streaming since 2016. We have over 11 PB under management and have saved our clients over $200M in data architecture costs.
SME support hours: All managed service plans include SME support hours.
Transparent pricing: No hidden fees or unexpected charges—just straightforward, flat-rate pricing tailored to your needs.
Customized solutions: Dattell collaborates closely with clients to design solutions that align with specific operational requirements and budget constraints.
Proactive support: Beyond reactive troubleshooting, Dattell prioritizes proactive monitoring and optimization to ensure peak performance.
Assistance with supporting technologies and teams: Our SMEs can aid in troubleshooting apps that interface with Pulsar, such as Logstash and Flink. And our SMEs will work with your developers to ensure they understand best practices.

Be mindful of the messaging—not all sales claims hold up

If you’ve been exploring managed Pulsar offerings, you’ve likely heard some bold claims from sales teams. You’re too sharp to take those at face value—and to underscore what you’re probably already realizing, let’s clarify a couple of common misconceptions we’re seeing in the market.

Debunking the "cloud-native" claim

StreamNative markets Pulsar as inherently cloud-native. While Pulsar’s architecture supports cloud deployments, it’s crucial to understand its components:

Pulsar Brokers: Handle message delivery and are designed for scalability.
Apache BookKeeper: Manages persistent storage.
Apache ZooKeeper: Coordinates metadata and configurations.

While brokers can be containerized and managed in cloud environments, BookKeeper and ZooKeeper introduce complexities that challenge the “cloud-native” label. True cloud-native systems are designed for seamless deployment and management in cloud environments, often leveraging container orchestration and microservices architectures.

Debunking the "Pulsar scales up and down effortlessly" myth

A common claim from some providers is that Apache Pulsar can seamlessly scale up and down to match workload demands. While it’s true that Pulsar’s architecture offers scalability advantages, it’s essential to understand the nuances:

Pulsar Brokers: These are stateless components responsible for handling client connections and routing messages. Their stateless nature allows them to scale horizontally with relative ease, making it straightforward to add or remove brokers based on demand.
BookKeeper (Bookies): Serving as the storage layer, Bookies are stateful components that store message data. Scaling BookKeeper involves data replication and ensuring data consistency, which is a more complex and time-consuming process compared to scaling stateless components. As noted in StreamNative’s own documentation, auto-scaling for BookKeeper clusters is not supported at this time.
ZooKeeper: Used for metadata management, ZooKeeper is also a stateful component. Scaling ZooKeeper is non-trivial and requires careful planning to maintain cluster stability.

Therefore, while scaling Pulsar Brokers can be achieved relatively quickly, scaling the entire Pulsar system, including BookKeeper and ZooKeeper, is a more involved process. Claims that Pulsar can instantly scale up and down without considering these complexities can be misleading.

At Dattell, we provide clear guidance on scaling strategies, ensuring that our clients have a realistic understanding of the time and resources required to scale their Pulsar deployments effectively.

Choosing the best Pulsar service provider for your use case

While StreamNative’s association with Pulsar’s origins is noteworthy, it’s essential to evaluate service providers based on current offerings, support quality, and cost-effectiveness. Dattell stands out by delivering tailored, transparent, and reliable Pulsar solutions that align with organizational goals and budgets.

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Comparing Dattell & StreamNative Choosing the right Apache Pulsar Partner