We are developing a social app with features such as messaging, notifications etc. We decided to use Yedis [0] (Yugabyte Redis) which is a distributed Redis with persistence backed by RocksDB. Yugabyte supports multiple datacentre distribution. Yedis's pub/sub is distributed as well. We are already running a Yugabyte cluster for data storage in Cassandra. So we didn't have to do anything extra to get our distributed pub/sub up and running. Would you recommend using Pulsar instead?
Redis pub/sub is simplistic and ephemeral. There's no persistence or really anything beyond sending some data to any listeners who may be active at that moment.
Redis Streams now offers a capable persistent message stream solution and if/when Yugabyte supports that then it might be a good competitor. Otherwise Kafka/Pulsar offer much for persistent streams.
There's also KeyDB which is a forked Redis that comes with multithreading and persistence to support larger-than-RAM workloads and active/active failover. https://github.com/JohnSully/KeyDB
I am not familiar enough with either Yedis or your use case to make a recommendation, but I can say that Pulsar has a great set of features, particularly if you need long term retention, that make it very attractive. I also been impressed with the community and development pace.
Being that the project is a top level Apache project and also has some adoption by quite a few different companies and a number of corporate sponsors the future of the project is pretty safe bet.
Normally don't plug my own work, but this is super related. Did you ever check out Stream? https://getstream.io/
We power chat and feeds for >500 million end users. Tech is Go, RocksDB & Raft based.
Yes, we did indeed consider Stream, but figured we could save some money by deploying and running our own system. We are very hopeful to quickly get a couple million users in a short time from our launch and that would have ran up our costs with stream quickly.
That's nice to hear. Best of luck with your project.
We've had some really large companies move to Stream from their in-house tech and save 30-70% comparing Stream's monthly fees vs their in-house hosting. (the difference gets much larger if you add the engineering & maintenance cost of their in-house systems). If your team is in the USA & funded it's pretty difficult to build in-house with a good ROI.
0: https://docs.yugabyte.com/latest/yedis/