Twitter has released a new open source project called Heron. The social media company developed Heron internally as an alternative for Apache Storm and has been successfully using it for more than two years.
In recent years, Storm has become popular for real-time big data analytics. Heron is backward compatible with Storm, but Twitter says that it offers better speed, scalability, debugging, deployment and management. According to Twitter, Heron offers a 2x to 5x improvement in efficiency over Storm.