Apache Storm

Apache Storm is a distributed computation framework written predominantly in the Clojure programming language. Apache Storm makes it easy to reliably process unbounded streams of data, doing for real-time processing what Hadoop did for batch processing.

Originally created by Nathan Marz and team at BackType, the project was open sourced after being acquired by Twitter. It uses custom created "spouts" and "bolts" to define information sources and manipulations to allow batch, distributed processing of streaming data. The initial release was on 17 September 2011. A Storm application is designed as a "topology" in the shape of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with spouts and bolts acting as the graph vertices. Edges on the graph are named streams and direct data from one node to another. Together, the topology acts as a data transformation pipeline. At a superficial level the general topology structure is similar to a MapReduce job, with the main difference being that data is processed in real-time as opposed to in individual batches.