A Survey on the Evolution of Stream Processing Systems

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews the evolution of stream processing systems over 20 years, highlighting key advancements, current trends, and open challenges in the field.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison between early and modern stream processing systems and discusses recent trends and unresolved issues.

Findings

Significant progress in out-of-order data management and fault tolerance.

Modern systems emphasize elasticity and reconfiguration.

Open problems include scalability and real-time guarantees.

Abstract

Stream processing has been an active research field for more than 20 years, but it is now witnessing its prime time due to recent successful efforts by the research community and numerous worldwide open-source communities. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of fundamental aspects of stream processing systems and their evolution in the functional areas of out-of-order data management, state management, fault tolerance, high availability, load management, elasticity, and reconfiguration. We review noteworthy past research findings, outline the similarities and differences between early ('00-'10) and modern ('11-'22) streaming systems, and discuss recent trends and open problems.