By Michael Branson 3 min read
April 24, 2018

Streaming Analytics: New features and new price plans

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, a new version of the service is generally available, providing a set of exciting new features and new set of price plans.

The new version of the service runs on a Kubernetes container-based infrastructure, and provides several new functional enhancements. The new price plans give you access to this enhanced version. (The general availability of the new version ends the beta that was launched on 2/15/2018).

New Features

The following new features are now generally available:

  • 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.

  • Guaranteed tuple processing – The IBM Streams concept of consistent regions is now supported in the IBM Cloud. All instances created under the new price plans 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.

  • OS upgrade – Streams instances created through the new price plans will run in CentOS 7.4 environments.

  • Identity & Access Management – Instances created under the new price plans use 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.

  • Enhanced Streaming Analytics REST API – Instances created with the new price plans use version 2 of the Streaming Analytics REST API, following the structure and conventions consistent other IBM Cloud APIs.

  • Problem determination enhancements in the Streams Console – See Nancy Weir’s post on Streamsdevfor a detailed description of these enhancements.

  • Enhanced performance monitoring from the Streams Console – See Oriana Zambrano Azuaje’s post on Streamsdev for more information about these new capabilities.

  • Integration with Activity Tracker – Streaming Analytics is now integrated with the Activity Tracker service which records user-initiated activities that change the state of a service in the IBM Cloud. Activity tracker can be used to review and visualize what operations have been performed on your services, and to comply with regulatory audit requirements.

  • Improved application resiliency – In the past, Streams app recovery was only supported in instances with two or more application resources. Now, apps running in instances created under a new price plan will be able recover from resource failures even in the case of an instance using a single application resource.

New Price Plans

Seven new price plans have been added. We call these the V2 price plans because instances created with them only support the V2 Streaming Analytics REST API. But they are also distinguished by the set of new features listed in the previous section, i.e. they are container-based, they run in CentOS 7.4, they use IAM, etc. The seven new plans break down as follows:

  • A Lite plan that provides a single, 1-core container.

  • Two Entry plans that use 1-core containers with hourly or monthly billing

  • Two Enhanced plans that use 4-core containers with hourly or monthly billing

  • Two Premium plans that use 16-core containers with hourly or monthly billing

The existing, VM-based price plans are still supported, but as described above, the features and characteristics of the V2 price plans are significantly different than the existing V1 price plans.

Getting Started with the New Service Features

If you have been using one of the plans offered during the recent beta, there is now an equivalent plan that is generally available, as well as a set of more-powerful plans. To get started with one of the new plans:

  1. Visit the Streaming Analytics page in the IBM Cloud catalog and create a Streams instance using one of the V2 price plans.

  2. Run one of our Sample Applications for the new price plans, or develop and run your own Streams app by following our Streaming Analytics Development Guide.

Categories

Analytics  |  Data science
Michael Branson
None

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