Introducing Azure Stream Analytics

Azure Stream Analytics  which is currently in preview is a fully managed real-time stream analytics service that aims at providing highly resilient, low latency, and scalable complex event processing of streaming data for scenarios such as Internet of Things, command and control (of devices) and real-time Business Intelligence on streaming data.

Although it might look similar to Amazon Kinesis, it seems to distinguish itself by aiming to increase developer productivity by enabling you to author streaming jobs using a SQL-like language to specify necessary transformations and it provides a range of operators which are quite useful to define time-based operations such as windowed aggregations (Check out Stream Analytics Query Language Reference for more information) – listed below is an example taken from the documentation which finds all toll booths which have served more than 3 vehicles in the last 5 minutes (See Sliding Window – slides by an epsilon and produces output at the occurrence of an event)

SELECT DateAdd(minute,-5,System.TimeStamp) AS WinStartTime, System.TimeStamp AS WinEndTime, TollId, COUNT(*) 
FROM Input TIMESTAMP BY EntryTime
GROUP BY TollId, SlidingWindow(minute, 5)
HAVING COUNT(*) > 3

This SQL like language allows for non-developers to built stream processing solutions through the Azure Portal and allows to easily filter, project, aggregate and join streams, add static data (master data) with streaming data and detect patterns within the data streams without developer intervention.

 

Azure Stream Analytics leverages cloud elasticity to scale up or scale down the number of resources on demand thereby providing a distributed, scale out architecture with very low startup costs. You will only pay for the resources you use and have the ability to add resources as needed. Pricing is calculated based on the volume of data processed by the streaming job (in GB) and the number of Streaming Units that you are using. Streaming Units provide the scale out mechanism for Azure Stream Analytics and provide a maximum throughput of 1MB/sec. Pricing starts as low as €0.0004/GB and €0.012/hr per streaming unit (roughly equivalent to less than 10€/month). It also integrates seamlessly with other services such as Azure Event Hub, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Storage and Azure SQL databases.

References

• Introducing Azure Stream Analytics: Processing on Near-Realtime Data (TechEd Europe 2014 recording)
  
• Microsoft adds IoT Streaming Analytics, Data Production and Workflow Services to Azure
  
• Telemetry and Data Flow at Hyper-Scale: Azure Event Hub

Tags van Technorati: azure,stream+Analytics,microsoft,cloud,big+data