Book Image

Practical Real-time Data Processing and Analytics

Book Image

Practical Real-time Data Processing and Analytics

Overview of this book

With the rise of Big Data, there is an increasing need to process large amounts of data continuously, with a shorter turnaround time. Real-time data processing involves continuous input, processing and output of data, with the condition that the time required for processing is as short as possible. This book covers the majority of the existing and evolving open source technology stack for real-time processing and analytics. You will get to know about all the real-time solution aspects, from the source to the presentation to persistence. Through this practical book, you’ll be equipped with a clear understanding of how to solve challenges on your own. We’ll cover topics such as how to set up components, basic executions, integrations, advanced use cases, alerts, and monitoring. You’ll be exposed to the popular tools used in real-time processing today such as Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and Storm. Finally, you will put your knowledge to practical use by implementing all of the techniques in the form of a practical, real-world use case. By the end of this book, you will have a solid understanding of all the aspects of real-time data processing and analytics, and will know how to deploy the solutions in production environments in the best possible manner.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Overview of Storm


Storm is an open source, distributed, resilient, real-time processing engine. It was started by Nathan Marz in late 2010. He was working at BackType. On his blog, he mentioned the challenges he faced while building Storm. It is a must read: http://nathanmarz.com/blog/history-of-apache-storm-and-lessons-learned.html.

Here is the crux of the whole blog: initially, real-time processing was implemented like pushing messages into a queue and then reading the messages from it using Python or any other language and processing them one by one. The challenges with this approach are:

  • In case of failure of the processing of any message, it has to be put back into the queue for reprocessing
  • Keeping queues and the worker (processing unit) up and running all the time

What follows are two sparking ideas by Nathan that make Storm capable of being a highly reliable and real-time engine:

  • Abstraction: Storm is a distributed abstraction in the form of streams. Streams can be produced and processed...