Case Study: Cisco scales IoT messaging for 245M+ devices with StreamNative's Apache Pulsar

Scaling IoT Control Center with Pulsar Integration at Cisco

Cisco needed a reliable, scalable messaging backbone for its IoT Control Center, which manages 245 million devices across 17 geo-replicated deployments and processes billions of API calls each month. To replace its legacy Kestrel broker, Cisco turned to StreamNative’s Apache Pulsar-based solution to support massive pub/sub workloads, strong security, geo-replication, and low operational overhead.

With StreamNative’s Pulsar deployment on Kubernetes, using Pulsar Operator and Flux CD for Git-driven operations, Cisco built a modern CDR processing pipeline with protobuf messaging, automated failover, and declarative cluster management. The result was faster, lighter messaging with message sizes reduced from 1–2 KB to about 400 bytes, painless updates in about 30 minutes, and reliable performance across all 17 deployments with enough headroom to absorb traffic spikes.

Cisco