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Microsoft Makes Apache Storm Generally Available And Improves Productivity for Real-Time Analytics on Big Data

On Wednesday at the Strata+Hadop World conference, we announced Apache Storm becoming generally available. This post will give you the ins and outs of this new offering.

On Wednesday at the Strata+Hadop World conference, we announced Apache Storm becoming generally available. This post will give you the ins and outs of this new offering.

What is Apache Storm on Azure HDInsight?

Apache Storm is a distributed, fault-tolerant, open source real-time event processing solution. Storm was originally used by Twitter to process massive streams of data from the Twitter firehose. Storm is ideal for real-time scenarios like fraud detection, click stream analysis, financial alerts, telemetry from connected sensors and devices (IoT), social analytics, ‘always on’ ETL pipelines, and network monitoring. Customers can source these real-time events from devices, sensors, infrastructure, applications, websites, and data. Linkury is using HDInsight with Storm for its online monetization services, for example.

Typically, Storm will be integrated with a scalable event queuing system like Apache Kafka or Azure Event Hubs.

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How is Microsoft making Apache Storm more Productive?

Microsoft has been on a journey to make Big Data easy and more approachable. Storm for Azure HDInsight is an example of this by giving users a simple way to deploy and manage real-time applications with just a few clicks and within minutes. There’s no time-consuming installation or set-up. Azure does it for you without buying new hardware or other up-front costs. You will also have Microsoft’s 99.9% service level agreement for uptime and elastic scale powered by the Azure cloud.

Part of making big data more accessible includes enabling developers to be productive in the environments they know best. This is why we are also making Storm available for both .NET and Java and the ability to develop, deploy, and debug real-time applications for Storm directly in Visual Studio.  Developers can even mix spouts written in other languages like Java, meaning you can leverage the vast universe of existing spouts and bolts as part of your topology.

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How do I get Started?

To get started, customers will need to have an Azure subscription or a free trial to Azure. With this in hand, you should be able to get a Storm cluster up and running in minutes by going through this getting started guide.

Also, head over to watch this Channel 9 video below:

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For more information on the announcements we made at Strata, head over to the Official Microsoft Blog and the Azure Blog.

More information on Storm for HDInsight:

General information on HDInsight: