Storm ships a Docker Compose configuration under docker/ that provisions a fully distributed cluster on a single machine. Unlike local mode, this setup forces inter-worker traffic across real sockets, making it suitable for benchmarking serialization, compression, and network-sensitive behaviours that only appear with genuine inter-process communication.

What's included

• Nimbus, ZooKeeper, and two Supervisors on an isolated Docker network
• Prometheus scraping Storm's Metrics V2 endpoint
• Grafana with a pre-built per-task dashboard covering throughput, latency, and jitter
• netsim.sh — a utility that injects controlled latency and jitter between Supervisors using tc netem

Starting the cluster

cd docker/
docker compose up -d

Once healthy, Grafana is available at http://localhost:3000 (default credentials: admin / admin). The Storm UI is at http://localhost:8080.

Submitting a topology

The storm-perf module contains topologies designed for this environment:

storm jar storm-perf/target/storm-perf-*.jar \
  org.apache.storm.perf.FileReadWordCountTopo \
  -c nimbus.seeds='["nimbus"]' \
  -c storm.zookeeper.servers='["zookeeper"]'

Any topology JAR works. Point nimbus.seeds and storm.zookeeper.servers at the Docker hostnames as shown above.

Network simulation

netsim.sh wraps tc netem to shape traffic between the two Supervisor containers:

# Add 3 ms latency and 1 ms jitter (typical intra-datacenter profile)
./netsim.sh apply 3ms 1ms

# Remove all shaping
./netsim.sh reset

# Show current tc settings on both supervisors
./netsim.sh status

# Round-trip ping between supervisors
./netsim.sh ping

Changes take effect immediately and are visible in the Grafana latency panels in real time.

Teardown

docker compose down

Persistent volumes are not configured; all topology data and metrics are lost on teardown. This cluster is intended for development and benchmarking, not production use.