Twitter is open sourcing Heron, a competitor to Apache Storm:
Apache Storm was the original solution to Twitter’s problems. It was created by a marketing intelligence company called BackType, and Twitter bought the company in 2011 and eventually open-sourced Storm, providing it to the Apache Foundation.
There’s no question Storm has a lot of advantages. It’s scalable and fault-tolerant, with a decent ecosystem of “spouts,” or systems for receiving data from established sources. But it was reputedly also hard to work with and hard to get good results from, and despite a recent 1.0 renovation, it’s been challenged by other projects, including Apache Spark and its own revised streaming framework.
It’s good to see this competition in the streaming space.