Twitter Heron: Stream Processing at Scale
Summary: Introduces Heron, a real-time stream engine to replace Storm at Twitter, addressing scale, debuggability, performance, and manageability. Design insights and empirical evidence of efficiency and scalability as Twitter’s de facto streaming backend. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Sanjeev Kulkarni (Twitter)
- 2. Nikunj Bhagat (Twitter)
- 3. Maosong Fu (Twitter)
- 4. Vikas Kedigehalli (Twitter)
- 5. Christopher Kellogg (Twitter)
- 6. Sailesh Mittal (Twitter)
- 7. Jignesh M. Patel (University of Wisconsin)
- 8. Karthik Ramasamy (Twitter)
- 9. Siddarth Taneja (Twitter)
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{kulkarni_sigmod15,
title = {{Twitter Heron: Stream Processing at Scale}},
author = {Kulkarni, Sanjeev and Bhagat, Nikunj and Fu, Maosong and Kedigehalli, Vikas and Kellogg, Christopher and Mittal, Sailesh and Patel, Jignesh M. and Ramasamy, Karthik and Taneja, Siddarth},
series = {{SIGMOD} '15},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
doi = {10.1145/2723372.2723374},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2723372.2723374},
year = {2015}
}
Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 45 of 45 citing papers.
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 6 of 6 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
| Rank | Cited Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 220 | Storm @Twitter | 2014 | SIGMOD | 0.00024244587 |
| 224 | MillWheel: Fault-Tolerant Stream Processing at Internet Scale | 2013 | VLDB | 0.00024130894 |
| 1,171 | Photon: Fault-tolerant and Scalable Joining of Continuous Data Streams | 2013 | SIGMOD | 0.00011826434 |
| 1,274 | Querying and Mining Data Streams: You Only Get One Look | 2002 | SIGMOD | 0.00011377527 |
| 1,639 | Summingbird: A Framework for Integrating Batch and Online MapReduce Computations | 2014 | VLDB | 0.00010155021 |
| 2,838 | Continuous Queries in Oracle | 2007 | VLDB | 8.0685625e-05 |
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| # | Overall Rank | Paper | Year | Venue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1,639 | Summingbird: A Framework for Integrating Batch and Online MapReduce Computations | 2014 | VLDB |
| 2 | 1,389 | Realtime Data Processing at Facebook | 2016 | SIGMOD |
| 3 | 7,617 | Squall: Scalable Real-time Analytics | 2016 | VLDB |
| 4 | 4,169 | The Unified Logging Infrastructure for Data Analytics at Twitter | 2012 | VLDB |
| 5 | 11,914 | Robust, Scalable, Real-Time Event Time Series Aggregation at Twitter | 2018 | SIGMOD |
| 6 | 5,748 | Fast Data in the Era of Big Data: Twitter's Real-Time Related Query Suggestion Architecture | 2013 | SIGMOD |
| 7 | 12,255 | Resa: Realtime Elastic Streaming Analytics in the Cloud | 2013 | SIGMOD |
| 8 | 7,794 | Tornado: A Distributed Spatio-Textual Stream Processing System | 2015 | VLDB |
| 9 | 1,224 | Dhalion: Self-Regulating Stream Processing in Heron | 2017 | VLDB |
| 10 | 220 | Storm @Twitter | 2014 | SIGMOD |