Apache Software Foundation announced that Apache Storm is now a top level Hadoop project. But what is Apache Storm about? Well, basically Apache Storm is a project to analyse data streams that are near real time. Storm works with messages and analyses what is going on. Storm originates from Twitter, which is using it for their streaming API. Storm is about processing time-critical data and Storm guarantees that your data gets processed. It is basically fault tolerant and scalable. Apache Storm is useful for fraud protection in gambling, banking and financial services, but not only there. Storm can be used wherever real-time or time-critical applications are necessary. At the moment, Storm allows to process 1 million tupels per second and node. This is massive, given the fact that Storm is all about scaling out. Imagine adding 100 nodes! Apache Storm works with Tupels that come from spouts. A spout is a messaging system such as Apache Kafka. Storm supports much more Messaging systems and it can easily be extended by it’s abstraction layer. Storm consists of some major concepts illustrated in the following image: 
Nimbus is the Master Node, similar to Hadoop‘s Job Tracker. ZooKeeper is used for Cluster coordination and the Supervisor runs the worker process. Each worker process consists of some subsets: an executor that is a thread spanned by the worker and a task itself.
Tuples in Apache Storm
Streams are an unbound sequence of Tuples, a Spout is a source of streams, Bolts process input streams and create new output streams and a topology is a network of Bolts and Spouts. The header image is provided as Creative Commons license by MattysFlicks.