About Streaming

What is streaming? Streaming handles many messages (or joins different streams of messages) at a time. These systems deal with events that are interlinked together.

You can think of streaming as a "conveyer belt" where you are sending a sequence of data. Rather than sending individual items, a stream focuses on a range of items. When you look at the messages on the conveyer belt, you are looking at a range of messages in the order they arrived to the application.

Like with messaging, the Pulsar broker manages the messages for you and sends the stream of data to the applications. Unlike messaging, streaming applications control when the data is delivered. In a messaging system, applications do not have control over when a message arrives.

Streaming use cases include:

• Moving large amounts of data to another service (logs to real-time ETL)
• Running periodic jobs to move large amounts of data and aggregating the data to more traditional stores (logs to S3)
• Computing near real-time aggregate of a message stream (real-time analytics over page views)

Next steps

• Learn about Using Pulsar for Messaging.
• Learn About Pulsar.