Apache Pulsar and ROS2

February 23, 2021

Introduction

What is ROS 2

ROS means Robot Operating System (but it’s not an operating system)

Features

  • A Framework, Prescribed patterns and Software libraries, and Tools to build robots applications.
  • A standard way to build and manage robot fleets.
  • Real-time system capable.
  • New capabilities for embedded platforms.
  • A real-world approach to gracefully degrading networks.
  • Python and C++ perferred, however bindings for Java, Rust and Node.js available.

What is Apache Pulsar

Apache Pulsar is a cloud-native, distributed messaging and streaming platform.

Features

  • Very low publish and end-to-end latency.
  • Seamless scalability to over a million topics.
  • A simple client API with bindings for Java, Go, Python and C++.
  • Guaranteed message delivery with persistent message storage provided by Apache BookKeeper.
  • A serverless light-weight computing framework Pulsar Functions offers the capability for stream-native data processing.
  • Tiered Storage offloads data from hot/warm storage to cold/longterm storage (such as S3 and GCS) when the data is aging out.

Why not just use Kafka?

Pulsar vs. Kafka — Part 1 — A More Accurate Perspective on Performance, Architecture, and Features

Why do I want to connect these two?

Next Steps