Raptor

Stream processing applications are becoming increasingly important in areas such as IoT, video analytics and social media. As a result, developers and operators must meet stringent time-to-market and scale requirements before bringing them to production. Unfortunately, testing a networked stream processing system is currently a cumbersome process that usually requires an expensive testbed and deep expertise on both networking and distributed systems. In this poster, we present Raptor, a tool for the fast prototyping of large-scale networked stream processing applications. Raptor builds on Mininet and Apache Kafka, two widely adopted platforms, to enable stakeholders to easily test their solutions under various operational conditions. Through a reasonably large setup (20 nodes) running on a single server, we show how unbalanced Kafka's leader selection algorithm can be and its implications on the overall system's throughput. We envision this work can help paving the way for more reproducible research in the stream processing domain, currently a first-class network application.