What are the use-cases of Hazelcast Jet? Has anyone started using it?
Our project uses Hazelcast for Distributed Map holding Key-Value pair and Distributed computing on those Keys to run the task at the node holding the Key. We use NearCache solution as well.
I was curious to know how different is Hazelcast Jet and what problems does it solve?
As of current version (0.3), Jet's advantage over just submitting a Runnable to each partition is the ability to perform grouping by a key other than the one used in the Hazelcast map. For this to work in a distributed environment you have to send each item to the processing unit responsible for its grouping key, and this is something that is easy to get from Jet.
Further from that, you can build a multistage cascade of groupBy operations, you can have forks in your data stream to reuse the same intermediate result in more than one way, you can build a pipeline where an I/O task distributes the processing of the data it reads across all CPU cores, etc... in short, all the advantages that a full-blown DAG computation engine offers.
By the time it reaches 1.0 Jet will also support fault-tolerant infinite stream processing, event time-based windows, and more.