I will be writing a series of blog posts about Apache Pulsar, including some Kafka vs Pulsar posts. First up though I will be running some chaos tests on a Pulsar cluster like I have done with RabbitMQ and Kafka to see what failure modes it has and its message loss scenarios.

I will try to do this by either exploiting design defects, implementation bugs or poor configuration on the part of the admin or developer.

In this post we’ll go through the Apache Pulsar design so that we can better design the failure scenarios. This post is not for people who want to understand how to use Apache Pulsar but who want to understand how it works. I have struggled to write a clear overview of its architecture in a way that is simple and easy to understand. I appreciate any feedback on this write-up.