The Nimbus node is the master in a Storm cluster. It is responsible for distributing the application code across various worker nodes, assigning tasks to different machines, monitoring tasks for any failures, and restarting them as and when required.

Nimbus is stateless and stores all of its data in ZooKeeper. There is a single Nimbus node in a Storm cluster. It is designed to be fail-fast, so when Nimbus dies, it can be restarted without having any effects on the already running tasks on the worker nodes. This is unlike Hadoop, where if the JobTracker dies, all the running jobs are left in an inconsistent state and need to be executed again.

Supervisor nodes are the worker nodes in a Storm cluster. Each supervisor node runs a supervisor daemon that is responsible for creating, starting, and stopping worker processes to execute the tasks assigned to that node. Like Nimbus, a supervisor daemon is also fail-fast and stores all of its state in ZooKeeper so that it can be restarted without any state loss. A single supervisor daemon normally handles multiple worker processes running on that machine.

In any distributed application, various processes need to coordinate with each other and share some configuration information. ZooKeeper is an application that provides all these services in a reliable manner. Being a distributed application, Storm also uses a ZooKeeper cluster to coordinate various processes. All of the states associated with the cluster and the various tasks submitted to the Storm are stored in ZooKeeper. Nimbus and supervisor nodes do not communicate directly with each other but through ZooKeeper. As all data is stored in ZooKeeper, both Nimbus and the supervisor daemons can be killed abruptly without adversely affecting the cluster.

The following is an architecture diagram of a Storm cluster:

A Storm cluster's architecture