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What's New in Apache Pulsar 3.2.0

Julien Jakubowski
· 4 min read

The Apache Pulsar community is thrilled to announce the launch of Apache Pulsar 3.2, a new feature release! This achievement is the result of a significant community collaboration, involving 57 contributors who made over 88 commits to add new features and fix bugs. Our heartfelt thanks go out to every contributor for their invaluable work!

What's new in Apache Pulsar 3.2?​

This release introduces 180+ improvements, optimizations, and fixes on the broker, Pulsar IO/Pulsar Functions, CLI, and others.

It also unveils key new features, highlighted below.

Rate limiting​

An increasing number of messaging-as-a-service platform teams are adopting Apache Pulsar as their main building block for providing messaging services across their organizations. This is clear validation that the value of Apache Pulsar’s truly multi-tenant architecture is delivering results, making Apache Pulsar a cost-efficient and reliable solution for messaging-as-a-service platform teams in very demanding application environments.

In the Apache Pulsar project, we are committed to delivering further improvements to the existing multi-tenancy features. One area of improvement is the service level management and capacity management of a large Pulsar system. This is also a key concern of messaging-as-a-service platform teams.

Apache Pulsar 3.2.0 features the implementation of PIP-322 Pulsar Rate Limiting Refactoring. Rate limiters act as a conduit to more extensive capacity management and Quality of Service (QoS) controls in Pulsar. They are integral to Pulsar's core multi-tenancy features. This refactoring paves the way for future enhancements in this area.

Null-key messages deletion during compaction​

Apache Pulsar supports Topic Compaction.

In versions 3.1.0 and earlier of Pulsar, topic compaction retains messages that have null keys.

Starting with Pulsar 3.2.0, the default behavior has been changed to delete messages with null keys during topic compaction, which helps in reducing storage costs. However, if necessary, you can revert to the previous behavior by setting topicCompactionRetainNullKey=true in broker.conf.

For more details, refer to the description in PIP-318.

WebSockets new features​

The Pulsar WebSocket API now supports:

  • Consuming multiple topics as described in PIP-307.
  • End-to-end encryption, as described in PIP-290.

Enhanced security for Pulsar Functions & Pulsar IO​

Pulsar 3.2.0 provides increased security for Pulsar Functions & Pulsar IO by allowing users to configure Pulsar Connectors with non-plaintext secrets. More details in PIP-289 & the following pull requests:

CLI user experience improvements​

This release introduces several handy features to the CLI, including:

Build improvement​

Pulsar 3.2.0 also introduces enhancements to the build process and reliability, including a Bill of Materials (BOM) to simplify dependency management, as outlined in PIP-326.

More​

Feel free to explore the full release notes for a detailed list of all improvements and fixes.

Compatibility between releases​

When upgrading an existing Pulsar installation, it's crucial to perform component upgrades in a sequential manner.

Starting from version 3.0, users have the option to perform live upgrades or downgrades between two consecutive LTS versions or two consecutive feature versions (which also include LTS versions).

For the 3.2 series, you should be able to upgrade from version 3.x.

Please refer to the release policy to learn more about the compatibility between releases.

Getting started​

Pulsar 3.2.0 is now available for download. To get started with Pulsar, you can run a Pulsar cluster on your local machine, Docker, or Kubernetes.

Getting involved​

Apache Pulsar is one of the fastest-growing open-source projects, recognized by the Apache Software Foundation as a Top 5 Project based on engagement. The vitality of Pulsar relies on continued community growth, which would not be possible without each and every contributor to the project. The Pulsar community welcomes contributions from anyone with a passion for open source, messaging, and streaming, as well as distributed systems! Looking for more ways to stay connected with the Pulsar community? Check out the following resources: