Microsoft announces General Availability of Azure Stream Analytics

Good news indeed. Today, Microsoft announced that Azure Stream Analytics “generally available”. No longer in BETA, general availability pricing will be in effect on June 1, 2015. For those who don’t know, Azure Stream Analytics is a real-time stream processing engine in the cloud that helps uncover insights from devices, sensors, infrastructure, and applications. Developers describe their desired event stream processing and transformations in an SQL-like query language, and the system abstracts the complexities of the parallelization, distributed computing, and error handling. Temporal semantics are built in.

Some new capabilities include support for automatically refreshing reference data, improved job diagnostics, and the ability to create new Azure Services for inputs and outputs within the context of your Stream Analytics job. These enhancements help one achieve a lower cost real-time streaming processing solution in the cloud.

Without giving away too much of our secret sauce, what we are interested the most in is:

Perform real-time analytics

Stream Analytics provides out-of-the-box integration with Event Hubs to ingest millions of events per second. Stream Analytics will process ingested events in real-time, comparing multiple real-time streams or comparing real-time streams together with historical values and models. This enables the detection of anomalies, transformation of incoming data, the ability to trigger an alert when a specific error or condition appears in the stream, and power real-time dashboards.