We used Pub/Sub very extensively (50B messages a day) but moved to Pulsar [0]. It performs equally well and has some nice features. And also no vendor lock-in.
Pulsar seems operationally quite complex, as it has a dependency on both BookKeeper and ZooKeeper (which BK also needs). ZooKeeper is particularly notorious for being difficult. What's your experience been like?
It definitely is on the more complex side of management. That's why we partnered with Kafkaesque to do the maintenance for us. We were fine handling it ourselves but decided to outsource it as it's less critical for us than many other internal tasks.
They have an open ticket [0] to dilute zookeeper's dependance, but as far as I know it's still pending.
The company I work for had the same stance 5 years ago. We regretted it a hundred times and now we stand the gaff. Nothing better than maintaining an EC2 based Cassandra cluster instead of simple using DynamoDB, huh...
I don't believe I advocated for the use of Cassandra. Owning vs being owned by, we are not arguing about the same things.
Stances are not strategies, when we use another's API we form a bond but the the other is free to break it so we are automatically at a weaker position. We have acquiesced. But if we choose a strategically worse choice, we have not only acquiesced, but done self-harm.
I agree with this, the best parts of the cloud is abstracting away a lot of the basic maintenance of these applications. There is lock in to some platform no matter what you do, but hopefully you can design your application so that if you do need to rearchitect you can do it in phases.
[0] https://kesque.com/billions-of-events-a-day-without-breaking...