Taylor Goetz gives a history of Storm up to release 1.0:
Storm was originally created by Nathan Marz while he was at Backtype (later acquired by Twitter) working on analytics products based on historical and real-time analysis of the Twitter firehose. Nathan envisioned Storm as a replacement for the real-time component that was based on a cumbersome and brittle system of distributed queues and workers. Storm introduced the concept of the “stream” as a distributed abstraction for data in motion, as well as a fault tolerance and reliability model that was difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with a traditional queues and workers architecture.
Nathan open sourced Storm to GitHub on September 19th, 2011 during his talk at Strange Loop, and it quickly became the most watched JVM project on GitHub. Production deployments soon followed, and the Storm development community rapidly expanded.
Storm is an exciting technology in that it’s a key driver in making Hadoop more than just a batch processing framework.