Summary: Microsoft announced a trio of new cloud data services on Wednesday aimed at stream processing and data pipelines. They’re not revolutionary, but they appear to have their own advantages, and they also help ensure Azure keeps up with the Joneses in cloud computing.
Microsoft continued its rollout of new Azure cloud services on Wednesday, with a trio of features to help users get a better handle on their data. Two of the new features — Stream Analytics and Event Hubs — deal with the processing of data in real time while the third, Data Factory, lets users visually diagram how data moves from one store to another and what happens to it at each step.
Microsoft’s biggest cloud competitors, Amazon Web Services and Google, already have their own stream-processing and pipeline services, so they’re really more like table stakes at this point than they are true points of distinction — except, of course, to the degree that any one is better than the others. Microsoft probably has the strongest hybrid cloud story among the three companies, which might make for more natural connections as pipelines span cloud and local data stores, but the AWS pipeline tool works with local sources as well.
Microsoft’s biggest cloud competitors, Amazon Web Services and Google, already have their own stream-processing and pipeline services, so they’re really more like table stakes at this point than they are true points of distinction — except, of course, to the degree that any one is better than the others. Microsoft probably has the strongest hybrid cloud story among the three companies, which might make for more natural connections as pipelines span cloud and local data stores, but the AWS pipeline tool works with local sources as well.
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