Streaming Analytics adds beta plans to introduce new features
The Streaming Analytics service in the IBM Cloud is an advanced analytic platform allowing user-developed applications to quickly ingest, analyze, and correlate information as it arrives from a wide variety of real-time data sources. Today, an enhanced version of the service has been released as a beta, to introduce some exciting new features.
The beta version of the service runs on a Kubernetes container-based infrastructure, and provides several new functional enhancements. The beta is accessed through two new service plans that have been added to the existing set of GA service plans available for Streaming Analytics. If you choose the Beta – Entry or Beta – Enhanced plan when you create your Streaming Analytics service, a Streaming Analyics beta instance will be provisioned for you, giving you access to the new features and behavior.
Key Features of the Beta
The beta introduces the following new features to the Streaming Analytics service:
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Streaming Analytics running on a container-based infrastructure – Containers provide security and availability advantages to Streaming Analytics, and they enable Streams compute resources to be dynamically allocated/returned as-needed when running your Streams applications.
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Guaranteed tuple processing – The IBM Streams concept of consistent regions is now supported in the IBM Cloud. All beta instances have a checkpointing repository pre-configured to support consistent regions. To learn how to exploit consistent regions in your Streams apps, see this introduction to consistent regions.
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OS upgrade – Streams instances created through the beta plans will run in CentOS 7.4 environments.
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Identity & Access Management – The beta adds IBM Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM) to the Streaming Analytics service, enabling you to securely authenticate users and control access to all cloud resources consistently throughout IBM Cloud.
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Enhanced Streaming Analytics REST API – The beta introduces version 2 of the Streaming Analytics REST API, following the structure and conventions consistent other IBM Cloud APIs.
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Problem determination enhancements in the Streams Console
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Enhanced performance monitoring from the Streams Console
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Integration with Activity Tracker – The beta integrates Activity Tracker with the Streaming Analytics service. Activity Tracker is an IBM Cloud service that records user-initiated activities that change the state of a service in the IBM Cloud. It can be used to review and visualize what operations have been performed on your services, and to comply with regulatory audit requirements.
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Improved application resiliency – In the past, Streams app recovery was only supported in instances with two or more application resources. Now, your Streams apps will recover from resource failures even in the case of an instance using a single application resource.
Getting Started with the Beta
To get started with the beta, visit the Streaming Analytics page in the IBM Cloud catalog and create a Streams instance using one of the beta service plans.