How to Add and Remove Nodes in Apache Pulsar

Adding and removing nodes is one of the most common operations when managing a distributed system. We’ve heard from users that have used both Apache Kafka and Apache Pulsar that adding and removing nodes can be operationally burdensome in Kafka because it requires operations teams to manually balance data between nodes in the cluster. This balancing act is known to be error prone and to consume a lot of bandwidth, making it all too easy to break production deployments.

Apache Pulsar, in contrast, is built on top of a layered, segment-oriented architecture that separates stateless serving from stateful persistence. This clean separation between concerns allows for independent scalability between the serving and persistence layers, which significantly simplifies operations. In Pulsar, adding and removing nodes is incredibly simple because there’s no need to rebalance data.

For some technical details behind node operations in Pulsar, check out our blog post how a segment-based architecture delivers better performance, scalability and resilience.

In this more practical tutorial video, I'll show you how easy it is to add/remove nodes to/from an existing Apache Pulsar cluster.

More on Apache Pulsar

If you want to learn more about Apache Pulsar, please visit the official website at https://pulsar.apache.org.

If you want to learn more about the differences between Apache Pulsar and Apache Kafka, please checkout our comparison series of blog posts:

• Part 1 — Comparing Pulsar and Kafka: Unified Queuing and Streaming
• Part 2 — Comparing Pulsar and Kafka: How a Segment-based Architecture Delivers Better Performance, Scalability and Resilience
   

You can also participate in the Pulsar community via:

• The Pulsar slack channel. You can self-register at https://apache-pulsar.herokuapp.com.
• The Pulsar email list.
   

For getting the latest updates about Pulsar, you can follow the projects on Twitter @apache_pulsar.

Thanks,
Sijie Guo