[herdrick]

This sounds great.

This is the traditional realtime processing use case: process messages and update a variety of databases.

Question: I typically think of real-time as a need for user-facing things, i.e. handling a user's requests before he gets bored and goes away. Is Storm set up for that? Or is it mostly meant to update a database with results rather than return them to a waiting process?

[nathanmarz]

It handles both cases. Storm can be used to asynchronously update databases in realtime in a scalable way (replacing traditional systems of queues and workers). Using Storm for Distributed RPC lets you do intense computations on Storm and return them to a waiting process.

[herdrick]

Ah yes, I should have read not scanned "3. Distributed RPC". Thanks.