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Apache Storm

Analyzing large volumes of data with Apache Storm

Article from ADMIN 29/2015

By Holger Reibold

We take you through the installation of a Storm cluster and discuss how to create your own topologies.

Huge amounts of data that are barely manageable are created in corporate environments every day. This data includes information from a variety of sources such as business metrics, network nodes, or social networking. Comprehensive real-time analysis and evaluation are required to ensure smooth operation and as a basis for business-critical decisions. A big data specialist such as Apache Storm is necessary to organize such amounts of data. In this article, I will walk you through the installation of a Storm cluster and touch on the subject of creating your own topologies.

Whether your company is in production or the service industry, the volumes of data that need to be processed keep growing from year to year. Today, many different sources deliver huge volumes of information to data centers and staff computers. Thus, the focus is on big data – a buzzword that seems to electrify the IT industry.

Big data concerns the economically meaningful production and use of relevant findings from qualitatively different and structurally highly diverse information. To make matters worse, this raw data is often subject to rapid change. Big data requires concepts, methods, technologies, IT architectures, and tools that companies can use to control this flood of information in a meaningful way.

Storm at a Glance

Storm was originally developed by Twitter and has been maintained under the aegis of the Apache Software Foundation since 2013. It is a scalable open source tool that focuses on real-time analysis of large amounts of data. Whereas Hadoop primarily relies on batch processing, Storm is a distributed, fault-tolerant system which – like Hadoop – specializes in processing very large amounts of data. However, the crucial difference lies in real-time processing.

Another feature is its high scalability: Storm uses Hadoop ZooKeeper for cluster coordination and is therefore

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