In the future, StreamNative will focus on improving the privatization deployment service of StreamNative Platform, strengthening customer service and expansion in finance, Internet of Things and other industries, and helping enterprises in traditional industries to digitally transform.
In the digital world, the open source community is a "utopia" for programmers.
Without an open source community and countless programmers willing to share their code, the big Internet players might have to invent the wheel ten thousand times.
When it comes to the "open source community", just like the open source community represented by GitHub, due to the early start of the Internet in Europe and the United States and the maturity of the business environment, not only is it more complete in open source construction than in China, but also the open source thinking is more advanced.
Therefore, many excellent open source projects were born overseas, and then gradually expanded their development positions to the Chinese market. Apache Pulsar, the top project of the Apache Software Foundation, has taken such a path, but it is worth mentioning that Apache Pulsar has already won the favor of many overseas companies before entering the Chinese market.
Apache Pulsar is a next-generation cloud-native distributed messaging platform that integrates messaging, storage, and lightweight functional computing with streaming data storage features such as strong consistency, high throughput, low latency, and high scalability.
StreamNative, a commercialization company of Apache Pulsar, just announced in October this year to receive a $23 million Series A round of financing, which was jointly led by Saudi Aramco's diversified venture capital fund Prosperity7 Ventures and Huatai Innovation, an alternative investment subsidiary of Huatai Securities, and the old shareholder Sequoia China and Source Code Capital continued to increase. StreamNative completed a multi-million dollar Pre-A round of financing in August 2020, led by Source Code Capital and followed by Sequoia China Seed Fund; in 2019, the team received angel round investment from Sequoia China Seed Fund at the beginning of its establishment. Judging from the pace of financing, this is still a very young open source commercialization company.
However, there is an interesting contrast: although StreamNative is still young, Apache Pulsar's technology and community have grown very old after being tested by a variety of industry users and massive data scenarios.
The birth of Apache Pulsar has undergone a long period of technological change, and its story begins with Guo Sijie, co-founder and CEO of StreamNative.
A former Yahoo employee, Guo sijie used the opportunity at Yahoo to create and incubate two top open source projects that would later become the Apache Software Foundation, Pulsar and BookKeeper.
After the Apache Software Foundation incubated BookKeeper, Guo Sijie made a cloud cloud cloud (Pulsar prototype) on top of BookKeeper. Cloud Message Service has been running inside Yahoo for about 4-5 years, supporting many of the company's core businesses, such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, and so on. After supporting these businesses for about 4 years, Yahoo open-sourced the project in 2016, donated it to the Apache Software Foundation, and graduated in 2018 to become the Apache Software Foundation's top project.
Throughout Guo Sijie's entire work experience, he is closely linked to the Apache Software Foundation's open source projects, messaging middleware, and data systems. Today, StreamNative is the commercial company of Apache Pulsar and the only original Apache Pulsar technology in the world.
If you want to explain Apache Pulsar simply, it is equivalent to a distributed message queue, or distributed streaming data system. Message queues are usually used in some e-commerce payment transaction scenarios, and a message queue is needed to buffer traffic, which plays a role in cutting peaks and filling valleys.
To take a simple example, double 11 will have a large number of users at the same time to grab orders, if the website traffic all pour up, directly impact the database, may make the entire database hang up. So it will put a message queue in front of it to buffer all the requests, the traffic will enter the message queue, and the backend will have the corresponding service to process the corresponding request. In this way, the impact of large amounts of traffic on the entire database system can be avoided.
Apache Pulsar is designed in the message queuing space based on cloud-native infrastructure and works well in containerized environments. The traditional message queues of the previous generation, RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ, are all stand-alone systems, but it is difficult for stand-alone systems to support business growth, which is where Apache Pulsar leads.
At present, the Chinese users of Apache Pulsar have included many well-known Internet companies including Tencent, Baidu, Didi, Zhaopin, China Telecom, China Mobile, 360, BIGO, Lakala, Ping An Securities, Huya and so on.
Of course, technology alone is not enough. How to expand the influence of the community and let more people participate in community building and code contribution is the hard truth for the growth of the Apache Pulsar community.
In the view of StreamNative co-founder Zhai Jia, the community is the foundation of open source commercialization. Without a community foundation, open source projects are a backwater. Without a good community base, commercialization cannot be discussed.
StreamNative co-founder Zhai Jia
Technology is always iteratively updated, and the community is the best barrier. Zhai Jia, co-founder of StreamNative, believes that the community must have a place to attract users, so that they can enter the community to find their own place and participate in the contribution of the community.
Contributors can bring good word of mouth, help Pulsar community development and project growth, and when more people enter the community, they can give back and help project iteration.
Through the continuous iteration of the project, Pulsar's reputation and influence will continue to increase. As its open source commercialization company, With the expansion of brand influence, StreamNative will also reach users through the community, learn more about the needs of users in scenarios, continuously optimize products and services, and bring better services to more enterprises.
In order to better build the Apache Pulsar community and disseminate cutting-edge technology, StreamNative is also the organizer of the Pulsar Global Conference Pulsar Summit, which has a voice covering North America, Europe, Asia and many other regions. In addition to the conference, StreamNative will also organize offline salons about Pulsar from time to time, online TGIP ("Thank God, it's Pulsar" series of live events), community developer and user group meetings, and so on.
Nowadays, Apache Pulsar is developing rapidly, facing a wide range of business scenarios, using more in the Internet and financial industries, and also has a broad landing scene in retail e-commerce and the popular IoT and automatic driving. As a commercial company of Apache Pulsar, StreamNative needs enough top talents to continuously improve the next generation of messaging systems and streaming data systems.
StreamNative hopes that this new financing can absorb more outstanding talents through the power of capital to help them promote product research and development and landing, and also hopes to make good projects available to more Chinese companies as soon as possible. In the future, StreamNative will continue to upgrade and iterate on Apache Pulsar functions and features, and create a richer Pulsar ecosystem.
StreamNative Company Information
One of the more eye-catching points is the current StreamNative office method: full global distributed office. This style of Silicon Valley geek team has also attracted many excellent developers and technologists to join it, no matter where the employee is in the world, only need a computer to work, so the free and self-disciplined way also makes StreamNative more humanist.
In the future, StreamNative will focus on improving the privatization deployment service of StreamNative Platform, strengthen customer service and expansion in finance, Internet of Things and other industries, and help enterprises in traditional industries to digitally transform.
Now that the domestic open source momentum is strong and the tide of cloud native is surging up, StreamNative will continue to promote the open source community and ecosystem construction of Apache Pulsar, optimize the StreamNative Platform and StreamNative Cloud products and services, and help more enterprises accelerate the process of cloud native and digitalization.