Azure Sample App: Vehicle Real-Time Status Tracking, Statistics and Analysis

 

This sample app demonstrates how an Azure hosted application, using Storm, a distributed real-time computation system, and Apache Kafka, a publish-subscribe messaging system, keeps track of vehicle data in real time, from Vehicle’s speed to temperature, RPM and gear usage rate.

Text from the sample app:

Storm is a distributed real-time computation system. Similar to how Hadoop provides a set of general primitives for doing batch processing, Storm provides a set of general primitives for doing real-time computation. Storm is simple, can be used with any programming language, is used by many companies.

Kafka is a distributed, partitioned, replicated commit log service. It provides the functionality of a messaging system, but with a unique design.

This example shows how to deploy a Storm topology that reads data from the Kafka messaging system. You can use the Kafka client application to send vehicle real-time information from anywhere to the Kafka cluster. The Storm topology will translate those coordinates into JSON objects, use GeoJSON to identify the coordinates on the Bing map, and then keep a running record of Vehicle’s speed, temperature, RPM and gear usage rate. For persistence, the real-time data is stored in Microsoft Azure Table Storage service. The topology also writes data to Redis, which is how this web application gets the data. This web app is written in Node.js, uses Socket.IO and the express web application framework to read the data from Redis and display it via d3js.