It's barely similar, it's a fault-tolerant system for scaling computation. Storm provides real-time streaming computation. Your spouts provide infinite streams

It's barely similar, it's a fault-tolerant system for scaling computation. Storm provides real-time streaming computation. Your spouts provide infinite streams of tuples, small objects which store serialized other types that you then emit 0 or more tuples out of that tuple. You could liken it to a streaming mapreduce that you can rearrange into directed graphs of data flows called a topology. Re: Spark, it's a totally different paradigm that's like a map reduce which takes advantage of memory locality where Hadoop takes advantage of disk locality. Hive on Spark is a pretty beastly system.