Azure Stream Analytics and Apache Flink compete in the stream processing category. Azure Stream Analytics has the upper hand in seamless integration with Azure services, while Apache Flink is preferred for advanced stateful processing capabilities.
Features: Azure Stream Analytics benefits from its integration with Azure infrastructure, offering seamless connectivity to IoT Hub, Blob storage, and SQL server for effective real-time analytics. Apache Flink excels in state management, providing features like checkpointing, stateful transformations, and robust event time processing for low-latency applications.
Room for Improvement: Azure Stream Analytics could enhance pricing transparency and extend integration flexibility with non-Azure tools. Its logging and data joining features need refinement. Apache Flink requires better Python support, and its complex infrastructure demands substantial expertise, making deployment and maintenance challenging.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Azure Stream Analytics is known for its easy deployment on the public cloud and supportive Microsoft technical team, though increasing demands have affected the support quality. Apache Flink permits deployment across diverse environments but involves a steep learning curve despite extensive community support owing to its open-source nature.
Pricing and ROI: Azure Stream Analytics operates on a pay-as-you-go model, which can be costly for large-scale operations, though its pricing complexity is a noted issue. Apache Flink, being open-source, incurs no software cost, offering a favorable cost perspective and positive ROI when its unique strengths are leveraged.
Apache Flink is an open-source batch and stream data processing engine. It can be used for batch, micro-batch, and real-time processing. Flink is a programming model that combines the benefits of batch processing and streaming analytics by providing a unified programming interface for both data sources, allowing users to write programs that seamlessly switch between the two modes. It can also be used for interactive queries.
Flink can be used as an alternative to MapReduce for executing iterative algorithms on large datasets in parallel. It was developed specifically for large to extremely large data sets that require complex iterative algorithms.
Flink is a fast and reliable framework developed in Java, Scala, and Python. It runs on the cluster that consists of data nodes and managers. It has a rich set of features that can be used out of the box in order to build sophisticated applications.
Flink has a robust API and is ready to be used with Hadoop, Cassandra, Hive, Impala, Kafka, MySQL/MariaDB, Neo4j, as well as any other NoSQL database.
Apache Flink Features
Apache Flink Benefits
Reviews from Real Users
Apache Flink stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its low latency and its user-friendly interface. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:
The head of data and analytics at a computer software company notes, “The top feature of Apache Flink is its low latency for fast, real-time data. Another great feature is the real-time indicators and alerts which make a big difference when it comes to data processing and analysis.”
Ertugrul A., manager at a computer software company, writes, “It's usable and affordable. It is user-friendly and the reporting is good.”
Azure Stream Analytics is a robust real-time analytics service that has been designed for critical business workloads. Users are able to build an end-to-end serverless streaming pipeline in minutes. Utilizing SQL, users are able to go from zero to production with a few clicks, all easily extensible with unique code and automatic machine learning abilities for the most advanced scenarios.
Azure Stream Analytics has the ability to analyze and accurately process exorbitant volumes of high-speed streaming data from numerous sources at the same time. Patterns and scenarios are quickly identified and information is gathered from various input sources, such as social media feeds, applications, clickstreams, sensors, and devices. These patterns can then be implemented to trigger actions and launch workflows, such as feeding data to a reporting tool, storing data for later use, or creating alerts. Azure Stream Analytics is also offered on Azure IoT Edge runtime, so the data can be processed on IoT devices.
Top Benefits
Reviews from Real Users
“Azure Stream Analytics is something that you can use to test out streaming scenarios very quickly in the general sense and it is useful for IoT scenarios. If I was to do a project with IoT and I needed a streaming solution, Azure Stream Analytics would be a top choice. The most valuable features of Azure Stream Analytics are the ease of provisioning and the interface is not terribly complex.” - Olubisi A., Team Lead at a tech services company.
“It's used primarily for data and mining - everything from the telemetry data side of things. It's great for streaming and makes everything easy to handle. The streaming from the IoT hub and the messaging are aspects I like a lot.” - Sudhendra U., Technical Architect at Infosys
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