Updated June 2023
One of the attractions of hosted Apache Pulsar is the peace of mind that a third party is responsible for ensuring uptime. However, that conclusion doesn’t consider what a company loses by using a third party hosted service.
Fully managed Pulsar services, hosted directly in your internal environment (cloud or on-prem), still ensures the peace of mind that comes from third party hosted Pulsar without the loss in data ownership, speed, and data security.
What you give up when a third party hosts your Apache Pulsar implementation.
When you hand over Apache Pulsar hosting to a third party, you are inherently compromising on four critical factors: speed, data authority / data security, ownership, and pricing.
Speed: Building Pulsar alongside your infrastructure guarantees to reduce latency in your system. When we refer to building alongside your infrastructure we mean running Pulsar in your cloud or on-prem environment. On the contrary, when Pulsar is hosted in a third party’s cloud (i.e. hosted Pulsar), there is unnecessary latency.
Data Authority & Security: With Apache Pulsar hosted on a third party’s cloud, your company’s and customers’ data is exposed to additional risk for breach.
Ownership: By running Pulsar in your environment, you have an easier time changing how you manage your Pulsar service as your team grows or changes. You also have more autonomy to move to a new managed Pulsar provider should your current provider not live up to your expectations.
Pricing: By hosting your Apache Pulsar service in their environment, hosted Pulsar can end up costing you more in cloud fees because the host provider is incentivized to increase cloud costs and over-build your cluster to charge you more.
How Managed Pulsar Hosted in Your Environment Works
Fully managed Apache Pulsar in your environment looks much the same as hosted Apache Pulsar. You still get all of the benefits of a hosted solution, including:
- Apache Pulsar platform designed, built, and optimized by an expert Pulsar engineer
- 24/7 monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, and help desk from Pulsar experts
- Uptime guarantees– at Dattell we provide 99.999% uptime guarantees in our contracts
In addition, fully managed Pulsar, at least from Dattell, offers extra important services often not included from hosted providers:
- Regular preventative maintenance of your cluster(s) to ensure uptime and avoid disruption of service
- Customization of cluster(s) for your specific use case
- Meet all of your security goals, including authorization, authentication, and encryption
- Training for your staff
When is hosted Pulsar the right option?
Good question. We have yet to come up with a reason why a hosted solution provides any benefit to a business, other than for the company doing the hosting. Even for small companies without a large or experienced IT team, it still makes sense to keep Apache Pulsar hosted in your environment while utilizing a managed Pulsar provider, like Dattell. By hosting Pulsar internally you are reducing latency, increasing security, and in most cases decreasing the cost of managed Pulsar.
Apache Pulsar Support Services
If you are interested in 24/7 support, consulting, and/or fully managed Pulsar services, you can find more information on our Apache Pulsar services page.
Schedule a call with a Pulsar solution architect.
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