LightningBolt

LightningBolt is an open-source framework for real-time data processing and streaming. It provides a dataflow programming model in which applications are formed from a network of operators, including sources, transforms, aggregations, and sinks. The framework is designed to deliver low latency, high throughput, and fault tolerance across distributed deployments.

LightningBolt uses a distributed runtime that coordinates multiple worker processes to execute a directed acyclic graph of operators. It supports stateful operators with a pluggable state backend, checkpointing, and replay of streams to recover from failures. The I/O layer offers connectors to common data sources and sinks and can operate over batch or streaming inputs.

Key features include event-time processing, windowing, backpressure handling, dynamic scaling, and observability through built-in metrics and logging. The framework supports multiple language SDKs to enable rapid development and cross-language interoperability. It is designed to run on commodity hardware and cloud environments, with support for container orchestration and resource isolation.

LightningBolt originated from a research collaboration and was released to the community in the mid-2010s. Since then it has evolved through community governance, with regular releases and a focus on portability and extensibility.

Typical use cases include real-time analytics, monitoring and alerting, fraud detection, and IoT data pipelines where low latency processing is essential.

See also: real-time data processing, event-driven architectures, streaming frameworks.