Lowest total cost of ownership

Azure Stream Analytics is a fully managed PaaS service on Azure. There are no upfront costs or costs involved in setting up computer clusters and complex hardware wiring like you would do with an on-prem solution. It's a simple job service where there is no cluster provisioning and customers pay for what they use.

A key consideration is the variable workloads. With Azure Stream Analytics, you do not need to design your system for peak throughput and can add more compute footprint as you go.

If you have scenarios where data comes in spurts, you do not want to design a system for peak usage and leave it unutilized for other times. Let's say you are building a traffic monitoring solution—naturally, there is the expectation that it will expect peaks to show up during morning and evening rush hours. However, you would not want to design your system or investments to cater to these extremes. Cloud elasticity that Azure offers is a perfect fit here.

Azure Stream Analytics also offers fast recovery by checkpointing and at-least-once event delivery.

Here is a summary of the feature set:

• Zero upfront costs
• Up and running in seconds
• No SW or HW maintenance
• No performance tuning
• Pay only for usage
• Fully managed service
• No cluster topology management required
• Seamless scalability