Preface

At TheLadders, we’ve been using Storm since it was introduced to the world (version 0.5.x). In those early days, we implemented solutions with Storm that supported noncritical business processes. Our Storm cluster ran uninterrupted for a long time and “just worked.” Little attention was paid to this cluster, as it never really had any problems. It wasn’t until we started identifying more business cases where Storm was a good fit that we started to experience problems. Contention for resources in production, not having a great understanding of how things were working under the covers, sub-optimal performance, and a lack of visibility into the overall health of the system were all issues we struggled with.

This prompted us to focus a lot of time and effort on learning much of what we present in this book. We started with gaining a solid understanding of the fundamentals of Storm, which included reading (and rereading many times) the existing Storm documentation, while also digging into the source code. We then identified some “best practices” for how we liked to design solutions using Storm. We added better monitoring, which enabled us to troubleshoot and tune our solutions in a much more efficient manner.