A Smooth Sea Never Made a Skillful Sailor

I found this recent paper mentioned in Storm mailing lists on yet another performance comparison of Streams and Storm. Giving credit to IBM, this time around it seems paper is written by developers and not sales people. Here's the direct link to the pdf. Most of the paper was based on v. 0.8 of Storm but at the end of the paper comparison with Storm 0.9.0.1 was also referenced. Comparison was done using Storm 0.8 with ZeroMQ and Storm 0.9 with Netty for transfer protocol. It is an interesting read for a change. I am also surprised to see Apache Avro used for serialization. I will not cloud your judgement by stating my opinion but I remain skeptical of these papers. I urge Storm community to offer its findings from own comparison. One thing I'd like to state is that again IBM claims it is much faster to implement a use-case using Streams over Storm and from my own experience, I was able to install Storm 0.8, configure my IDE to develop and test topologies, implement my use case...

IBM has a white paper from 2013 comparing Streams with Storm. As expected, the paper is full of marketing mambo jumbo applicable for suits. I usually try to avoid such information but I couldn't resist. I have to give IBM credit for even having such a paper, to acknowledge Storm as a market leader, even if the motive is somewhat shady. The paper is a bit outdated, stating Storm is GPL licensed software and has no market leading companies behind it. If you haven't heard, Hortonworks has picked up Storm and has some committers dedicated to it. It's also part of Hortonworks Data Platform stack as of v. 2.1. In addition to that, Storm is now a top level Apache project and no longer GPL. 0MQ messaging is now a second class citizen in favor of Netty, a fully native Java stack. The argument of the paper is that Storm lacks enterprise support. Hortonworks will gladly provide it. Either way, this paper is kind of expected from a large vendor like IBM. I'm in no role suitable to ...

We're always looking at improving our realtime processing and over the past six months or so I've been looking at Apache Storm and IBM Streams. There are a few others like LinkedIn's Samza and Spark Streaming but I haven't had a chance to look into them. I will leave my findings for another post but for now, I have great news for people getting started with Streams. IBM began open-sourcing their Streams toolkits. Here's the announcement and links for those interested. The other most awesome news as far as I'm concerned is that IBM Streams is now able to run within a YARN application. I mean, with Apache Slider project announcement recently this would've been a natural thing but I'm glad IBM released it even before any work on Slider was done and Streams is compatible with Hadoop 2.2. This is definitely a step in the right direction if Streams wants a piece of Storm's marketshare. I am genuinely excited about the news. On a side note, I'm going...