« There’s renewed interest in stream processing and analytics. I write this based on some data points (attendance in webcasts and conference sessions; a recent meetup), and many conversations with technologists, startup founders, and investors. Certainly, applications are driving this recent resurgence. I’ve written previously about systems that come from IT operations as well as how the rise of cheap sensors are producing stream mining solutions from wearables (mostly health-related apps) and the IoT (consumer, industrial, and municipal settings). In this post, I’ll provide a short update on some of the systems that are being built to handle large amounts of event data.

Apache projects (Kafka, Storm, Spark Streaming, Flume) continue to be popular components in stream processing stacks (I’m not yet hearing much about Samza). Over the past year, many more engineers started deploying Kafka alongside one of the two leading distributed stream processing frameworks (Storm or Spark Streaming). Among the major Hadoop vendors, Hortonworks has been promoting Storm, Cloudera supports Spark Streaming, and MapR supports both. Kafka is a high-throughput distributed pub/sub system that provides a layer of indirection between “producers” that write to it and “consumers” that take data out of it. A new startup (Confluent) founded by the creators of Kafka should further accelerate the development of this already very popular system. Apache Flume is used to collect, aggregate, and move large amounts of streaming data, and is frequently used with Kafka (Flafka or Flume + Kafka). Spark Streaming continues to be one of the more popular components within the Spark ecosystem, and its creators have been adding features at a rapid pace (most recently Kafka integration, a Python API, and zero data loss).

Apache HBase, Apache Cassandra, and Elasticsearch are popular open source options for storing event data (the Team Apache stack of Cassandra, Kafka, Spark Streaming is an increasingly common combination). » […]

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Ben Lorica, Chief Data Scientist & Director of Content Strategy for Data at O’Reilly Media, Inc
Source: radaroreilly.com