Real-time analytics with Apache Storm – now in F#

Over the past several month I’ve been prototyping various aspects of  an IoT platform – or more specifically, exploring the concerns of “soft” real-time handling of communications with potentially hundreds of thousands of devices.

Up to this point, being in .NET ecosystem I’ve been building distributed solutions with a most excellent lightweight ESB – MassTransit, but for IoT we wanted to be a little closer to the wire. Starting with the clean slate and having discovered Apache Storm and Nathan’s presentation and I realized that it addresses exactly the challenges we have.

It appears to be the ultimate reactive microservices platform for lambda architecture: it is fairly simple, fault tolerant overall, yet embracing fire-n-forget and “let it fail” on the component level.

While Storm favours JDK for development, has extensive component support for Java developers and heavily optimizes for JRE components execution, it also supports “shell” components via its multilang protocol. Which is what, unlike Spark…