The exponential increase in streams of data from real-time sources requires data processing systems that can ingest this data, process it, and respond in real time. A typical use case involves an automated system that responds to sensor data by sending email to support staff or placing an advertisement on a consumer's smartphone. Apache Storm enables data-driven, automated activity by providing a realtime, scalable, fault-tolerant, highly available, distributed solution for streaming data.

Apache Storm is datatype-agnostic; it processes data streams of any data type. It can be used with any programming language, and guarantees that data streams are processed without data loss.

The following graphic illustrates a typical stream processing architecture: