A Survey of Distributed Data Stream Processing Frameworks

Big data processing systems are evolving to be more stream oriented where each data record is processed as it arrives by distributed and low-latency computational frameworks on a continuous basis. As the stream processing technology matures and more organizations invest in digital transformations, new applications of stream analytics will be identified and implemented across a wide spectrum of industries. One of the challenges in developing a streaming analytics infrastructure is the difficulty in selecting the right stream processing framework for the different use cases. With a view to addressing this issue, in this paper we present a taxonomy, a comparative study of distributed data stream processing and analytics frameworks, and a critical review of representative open source (Storm, Spark Streaming, Flink, Kafka Streams) and commercial (IBM Streams) distributed data stream processing frameworks. The study also reports our ongoing study on a multilevel streaming analytics architecture that can serve as a guide for organizations and individuals planning to implement a real-time data stream processing and analytics framework.