From the webpage:
Apache Samza is a distributed stream processing framework. It uses Apache Kafka for messaging, and Apache Hadoop YARN to provide fault tolerance, processor isolation, security, and resource management.
- Simple API: Unlike most low-level messaging system APIs, Samza provides a very simple call-back based "process message" API that should be familiar to anyone who's used Map/Reduce.
- Managed state: Samza manages snapshotting and restoration of a stream processor's state. Samza will restore a stream processor's state to a snapshot consistent with the processor's last read messages when the processor is restarted.
- Fault tolerance: Samza will work with YARN to restart your stream processor if there is a machine or processor failure.
- Durability: Samza uses Kafka to guarantee that messages will be processed in the order they were written to a partition, and that no messages will ever be lost.
- Scalability: Samza is partitioned and distributed at every level. Kafka provides ordered, partitioned, re-playable, fault-tolerant streams. YARN provides a distributed environment for Samza containers to run in.
- Pluggable: Though Samza works out of the box with Kafka and YARN, Samza provides a pluggable API that lets you run Samza with other messaging systems and execution environments.
- Processor isolation: Samza works with Apache YARN, which supports processor security through Hadoop's security model, and resource isolation through Linux CGroups.
Check out Hello Samza to try Samza. Read the Background page to learn more about Samza.
Ironic that I should find Samza when I was searching for the new incubator page for Storm. 😉
In fact, I found a comparison of Samza and Storm.
You can learn a great deal about Storm (and Samza) reading the comparison. It’s quite good.