Experimental Study on the Performance and Resource Utilization of Data Streaming Frameworks

Abstract : With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), data stream processing have gained increased attention due to the ever-increasing need to process heterogeneous and voluminous data streams. This work addresses the problem of selecting a correct stream processing framework for a given application to be executed within a specific physical infrastructure. For this purpose, we focus on a thorough comparative analysis of three data stream processing platforms – Apache Flink, Apache Storm, and Twitter Heron (the enhanced version of Apache Storm), that are chosen based on their potential to process both streams and batches in real-time. The goal of the work is to enlighten the cloud-clients and the cloud-providers with the knowledge of the choice of the resource-efficient and requirement-adaptive streaming platform for a given application so that they can plan during allocation or assignment of Virtual Machines for application execution. For the comparative performance analysis of the chosen platforms, we have experimented using 8-node clusters on Grid5000 experimentation testbed and have selected a wide variety of applications ranging from a conventional benchmark to sensor-based IoT application and statistical batch processing application. In addition to the various performance metrics related to the elasticity and resource usage of the platforms, this work presents a comparative study of the " green-ness " of the streaming platforms by analyzing their power consumption – one of the first attempts of its kind. The obtained results are thoroughly analyzed to illustrate the functional behavior of these platforms under different computing scenarios.