Graceful Performance Degradation in Apache Storm

TLDR: In this paper, the authors propose a consolidation strategy to pack as many applications as possible in a (cloud-centric) cluster with limited number of working nodes, however, collocated applications can negatively compete with each other, for obtaining the resource capacity in a shared platform that, in turn, the result may lead to a severe performance degradation among all running applications.

Abstract: The concept of stream data processing is becoming challenging in most business sectors where try to improve their operational efficiency by deriving valuable information from unstructured, yet, contentiously generated high volume raw data in an expected time spans. A modern streamlined data processing platform is required to execute analytical pipelines over a continues flow of data-items that might arrive in a high rate. In most cases, the platform is also expected to dynamically adapt to dynamic characteristics of the incoming traffic rates and the ever-changing condition of underlying computational resources while fulfill the tight latency constraints imposed by the end-users. Apache Storm has emerged as an important open source technology for performing stream processing with very tight latency constraints over a cluster of computing nodes. To increase the overall resource utilization, however, the service provider might be tempted to use a consolidation strategy to pack as many applications as possible in a (cloud-centric) cluster with limited number of working nodes. However, collocated applications can negatively compete with each other, for obtaining the resource capacity in a shared platform that, in turn, the result may lead to a severe performance degradation among all running applications.