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concepts

Why use Storm? more

• Apache Storm is a free and open source distributed realtime computation system.
• Storm has many use cases: realtime analytics, online machine learning, continuous computation, distributed RPC, ETL, and more.
• Storm is fast: a benchmark clocked it at over a million tuples processed per second per node.
• It is scalable, fault-tolerant, guarantees your data will be processed, and is easy to set up and operate.

Topologies more

• The logic for a realtime application is packaged into a Storm topology.
• A Storm topology is analogous to a MapReduce job. One key difference is that a MapReduce job eventually finishes, whereas a topology runs forever (or until you kill it, of course).
• A topology is a graph of spouts and bolts that are connected with stream groupings.

Topologies -> TopologyBuilder more

TopologyBuilder exposes the Java API for specifying a topology for Storm to execute. Topologies are Thrift structures in the end, but since the Thrift API is so verbose, TopologyBuilder greatly eases the process of creating topologies. The template for creating and submitting a topology looks something like:

TopologyBuilder builder = new TopologyBuilder();

builder.setSpout("1", new TestWordSpout(true), 5);
builder.setSpout("2", new TestWordSpout(true), 3);
builder.setBolt("3", new TestWordCounter(), 3)
         .fieldsGrouping("1", new Fields("word"))
         .fieldsGrouping("2", new Fields("word"));
builder.setBolt("4", new TestGlobalCount())
         .globalGrouping("1");

Map conf = new HashMap();
conf.put(Config.TOPOLOGY_WORKERS, 4);

StormSubmitter.submitTopology("mytopology", conf, builder.createTopology());

Running the exact same topology in local mode (in process), and configuring it to log all tuples emitted, looks like the following. Note that it lets the topology run for 10 seconds before shutting down the local cluster.

TopologyBuilder builder = new TopologyBuilder();

builder.setSpout("1", new TestWordSpout(true), 5);
builder.setSpout("2", new TestWordSpout(true), 3);
builder.setBolt("3", new TestWordCounter(), 3)
         .fieldsGrouping("1", new Fields("word"))
         .fieldsGrouping("2", new Fields("word"));
builder.setBolt("4", new TestGlobalCount())
         .globalGrouping("1");

Map conf = new HashMap();
conf.put(Config.TOPOLOGY_WORKERS, 4);
conf.put(Config.TOPOLOGY_DEBUG, true);

LocalCluster cluster = new LocalCluster();
cluster.submitTopology("mytopology", conf, builder.createTopology());
Utils.sleep(10000);
cluster.shutdown();

Streams more

• The stream is the core abstraction in Storm. A stream is an unbounded sequence of tuples that is processed and created in parallel in a distributed fashion.
• Streams are defined with a schema that names the fields in the stream's tuples. By default, tuples can contain integers, longs, shorts, bytes, strings, doubles, floats, booleans, and byte arrays. You can also define your own serializers so that custom types can be used natively within tuples.
• Every stream is given an id when declared. Since single-stream spouts and bolts are so common, OutputFieldsDeclarer has convenience methods for declaring a single stream without specifying an id. In this case, the stream is given the default id of "default".

Streams -> Tuple more

• The tuple is the main data structure in Storm. A tuple is a named list of values, where each value can be any type. Tuples are dynamically typed – the types of the fields do not need to be declared. Tuples have helper methods like getInteger and getString to get field values without having to cast the result.
• Storm needs to know how to serialize all the values in a tuple. By default, Storm knows how to serialize the primitive types, strings, and byte arrays. If you want to use another type, you’ll need to implement and register a serializer for that type.

Streams -> Serialization more

Spouts more

• A spout is a source of streams in a topology. Generally spouts will read tuples from an external source and emit them into the topology (e.g. a Kestrel queue or the Twitter API).
• Spouts can either be reliable or unreliable. A reliable spout is capable of replaying a tuple if it failed to be processed by Storm, whereas an unreliable spout forgets about the tuple as soon as it is emitted.
• Spouts can emit more than one stream. To do so, declare multiple streams using the declareStream method of OutputFieldsDeclarer and specify the stream to emit to when using the emit method on SpoutOutputCollector.
• The main method on spouts is nextTuple. nextTuple either emits a new tuple into the topology or simply returns if there are no new tuples to emit. It is imperative that nextTuple does not block for any spout implementation, because Storm calls all the spout methods on the same thread.
• The other main methods on spouts are ack and fail. These are called when Storm detects that a tuple emitted from the spout either successfully completed through the topology or failed to be completed. ack and fail are only called for reliable spouts.

Spouts -> ISpout more

Spouts -> IRichSpout more

Spouts -> Guaranteeing Message Processing more

Bolts more

• All processing in topologies is done in bolts. Bolts can do anything from filtering, functions, aggregations, joins, talking to databases, and more.
• Bolts can do simple stream transformations. Doing complex stream transformations often requires multiple steps and thus multiple bolts. For example, transforming a stream of tweets into a stream of trending images requires at least two steps: a bolt to do a rolling count of retweets for each image, and one or more bolts to stream out the top X images (you can do this particular stream transformation in a more scalable way with three bolts than with two).
• Bolts can emit more than one stream. To do so, declare multiple streams using the declareStream method of OutputFieldsDeclarer and specify the stream to emit to when using the emit method on OutputCollector.

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Understanding the Parallelism of a Storm Topology