PubSub+ Cloud Platform - Annual Commitment

My typical use case for the PubSub+ Platform  is as an event-driven solution for communication between two components.

The best features of the tool include multiple impressive capabilities, such as the multi-level folder structure creation. Users can create a queue or topic in a folder structure under C with program files and software. The performance and scalability of the PubSub+ Platform  are as impressive as Kafka.

The solution's ability to decouple message producers and consumers is exactly what we use these messaging solutions for, allowing us to have high cohesion and low coupling, making it an excellent solution for that purpose.

Regarding improving the PubSub+ Platform, I'm not sure about the pricing aspect, but I heard that it is quite expensive compared to Kafka. That's the only concern I can mention; otherwise, it was as impressive as Kafka, better than Kafka based on my experience working on the Solace and Kafka white paper.

I have more than 4 years of experience working with the PubSub+ Platform solution.

We don't know which deployment model we are using.

The PubSub+ Platform is a stable solution.

The scalability of the platform can be rated 8 out of 10.

We are not administrators, so we never reached out to support for the PubSub+ Platform.

Positive

The initial setup of the solution is an administrator setup, and we just use it. For us, using it is straightforward.

I have experience working with Kafka, PubSub+ Platform, and IBM MQ , all three of them.

We are customers, meaning my company uses Solace. We use it and customize it based on our needs.

Based on my experience, I would recommend other people use PubSub+ Platform.

Interested parties can contact me if they have any questions or comments about my review.

I rate the PubSub+ Platform a 9 out of 10.

We use PubSub+ primarily for long processing messages. For instance, we generate customer forms, which take a longer time. We place these requests in queues, process them, and return them to the queues. This ensures that messages are not lost due to the time-consuming nature of such tasks. We also use PubSub+ for audit trails where we intercept requests, apply them, and store them in MongoDB , placing them in the queue before final processing.

PubSub+ has enhanced our asynchronous mode processing, ensuring that messages are not lost and requests are kept until fully processed. This means that messages do not get lost in the network or time out, thus improving reliability and efficiency.

Some valuable features include reconnecting topics, placing queues, and direct connections to MongoDB . The platform provides a dashboard to monitor the status of messages, such as how many have been processed or delivered, which is helpful for tracking performance.

The solution could be improved by enhancing the message pooling size for persistent messages to handle both small and large messages effectively. Additionally, providing a comprehensive dashboard to display metrics such as message throughput, connection rates, latency, and automated alerts would be highly beneficial.

We have been working with Solace for about three to four years.

Stability is generally good, but occasionally we encounter delivery failures. These issues are usually traced back to specific nodes not working correctly.

While I haven't directly explored horizontal or vertical scaling techniques, PubSub+ can process transactions efficiently and scale to handle multiple topics and queues. It supports enterprise-level features and multi-cloud messaging. Our use of internal cloud models assists in scalability, enabling multiple consumers and publishers to use the system simultaneously.

I do not directly interact with customer support, but from what I hear from the admin team, they are responsive and resolve issues quickly.

Positive

We have also tried Rabbit MQ . However, the user community for Kafka is larger, offering more discussions and solutions in public forums.

We evaluated Rabbit MQ  and Kafka before deciding to use PubSub+.

I recommend considering Solace due to its enterprise-level features, high throughput, cloud integration, and security. It is a top competitor among similar products and offers significant benefits in reliability and scalability.

We handle publishing/emitting events to the PubSub+ Broker via one protocol, and it seamlessly makes the event available for multiple consumers with different protocols without writing code is one of the primary use cases for us. 

As an architect, I wanted to implement an event-driven architecture, majorly focusing on a cloud solution with a PubSub pattern. 

Out of curiosity, our CoE team explored Solace PubSub+, and after several months of testing with our requirements, this was the kind of solution we needed.

Previously, we used on-prem Kafka for event distribution. The Kafka cluster was self-managed and hence required a dedicated team and infrastructure to manage. We wanted a cloud solution, and Kafka was already available as a SaaS offering, yet we wanted a better and more compatible solution with respect to protocols and security. Hence, we opted for PubSub+ with the support of AMQP, JMS, MQTT, and HTTPS. Without writing code, we were successful in creating event-driven microservices; parallelly, administering the cluster was not our responsibility anymore.

We like the seamless flexibility in protocol exchange offering without writing a code. This is probably the most useful feature of Solace apart from the structural Topic segments. 

Solace PubSub+ has understood and implemented the best features of multiple PubSub brokers. I have seen segmenting of topics in IBM MQ  PubSub and have used that feature a lot. With such versatility, Solace has implemented one the most demanding PubSub broker, hence a PubSub+. It is a simple portal for event-driven architecture driving the entire microservices framework.

Feature-wise, it has almost everything that I can ask from an architect's point of view. 

For improvements, I would suggest increasing the max payload size to a limit of 100MB or more. The current max payload size is limited to 5MB. 

"Events" are supposed to be small in size, yet, as the name suggests for "broker", a broker should be capable of handling large payloads as well. Even Confluent  Kafka provides bigger payload size support for enterprise usage licenses. 

I've used the solution for two years.

We have used IBM MQ  pubsub and Kafka. We were moving away from the IBM stack and implementing microservices. Kafka would have been a good choice, yet keeping the future scope in mind; we opted for Solace.

We implemented the solution with the help of our own in-house team.

PubSub+ Event Broker is used to help manage architectures, such as real-time integrations of business processes and systems.

The most valuable feature of PubSub+ Event Broker is the scaling integration. Prior to using the solution, it was done manually with a file, and it can be done instantly live.

The section on observability pertains to understanding the functioning of an event crash. Instead of focusing on how the crash occurs, attention is given to the observable aspects, such as a memory pipeline where one person pushes messages and another reads them. However, this pipeline often encounters issues, such as the reader being unavailable, causing the system to become stuck and preventing the messages from moving forward. This can lead to the pipeline being permanently stalled.

More observing capabilities should be added.

I have used PubSub+ Event Broker within the past 12 months.

The solution is stable. We are informed about any outage that happens.

We have had times when messages were stuck and we have to flush the pipeline. There is a gap in the scalability.

We have two customers using this solution.

The initial setup of PubSub+ Event Broker is easy. We can simply connect the solution to an SAP S4/HANA. We had no difficulties.

To install SAP in the public cloud, we need to provide SAP with a basic configuration file, which is a straightforward JSON file. SAP takes care of the entire installation process based on the configuration provided by PubSub+ Event Broker. Therefore, most of the installation work is handled by SAP, and we only need to specify our requirements and the duration of the process. It's a relatively straightforward process.

We had a range of technical people involved in deploying this solution with a maximum of 10 assisting in the process.

The price of the solution is expensive.

I rate PubSub+ Event Broker a nine out of ten.

An enterprise-grade event broker for mediation of events produced by a heterogeneous hybrid landscape of SAP and non-SAP systems at scale.

An event registry/catalogue and a user-friendly visualization of event flow.

The event portal and the diversity of deployment options in a hybrid landscape are the most valuable features.

The licensing and the cost are the major pitfalls.

I have been using the solution for almost two years.

It is a very scalable and robust solution. I rate it a ten out of ten.