Storm is a distributed stream processing framework and fault-tolerant compute engine designed for executing real-time continuous computations across a cluster of machines. It functions as a stateful stream processor and cluster topology manager, enabling the deployment and monitoring of distributed data flow configurations.
The system ensures exactly-once semantics by utilizing transactional state management to guarantee that every message in a data stream is processed exactly one time. It further operates as a distributed RPC system, allowing for the integration of non-native languages through a standardized communication protocol.
The framework covers a broad range of capabilities including distributed stateful computation, cluster resource management, and the execution of system-level shell commands. It provides tools for monitoring stream performance, validating topology submissions, and implementing customizable data routing and serialization.