[toomanybits]

This smacks of being heavily one-product-focussed to me. Being a Kafka user it's hard enough managing and understanding one system, nevermind three or four joined together.

Maybe it's a bit faster or a bit more elastic, or whatever, who knows. What I really care about is whether I get called at 3am and in that regard the argument seems pretty weak. Kafka for all its woes is a solid system you know you can count on.

I'd much rather see someone come up with a truly innovative alternative that actually pushes the boundaries, rather than just copying what's there already, and adding a few window dressings.

[Jedd]

What kind of (lower level) surrogate metrics would you be interested in that could translate to '3am phone calls' when comparing messaging systems?

[toomanybits]

Being used by at least one company of significant size that (a) i've heard of and (b) isn't directly connected to the project would be a good start.

[Jedd]

'Directly connected' to a project might mean a user of - but I assume you mean a major contributor to (as even small time users of free software often contribute something - bug reports, feature requests, code contributions, money, etc).

The page: https://pulsar.apache.org/powered-by/ suggests there's quite some number of corporate users who are happy to confirm they use this suite. I don't know how many of those you've heard of, though.

I suspect many private & government agencies around the world would decline to formally attach their name to any list like this, lest it be (mis)interpreted as an endorsement.

[toomanybits]

I've heard of Comcast, but that's Yahoo. Not heard of the others.