1. Pulsar uses bookies to persist messages and brokers to serve clients and select bookies. ZooKeeper stores metadata.
2. When a message is produced, it is sent to a broker and written to multiple bookies. Consumers connect to brokers and receive messages from caches or by brokers reading from bookies.
3. Pulsar retains messages based on retention policies like time and size. Messages are deleted by segment once all subscriptions are caught up to avoid deleting messages still needed.