Cost-Aware Streaming Data Analysis: Distributed vs Single-Thread

Distributed systems have become the preferred solution for dealing with Big Data analysis tasks. These systems are able to achieve superior performance by managing a large pool of resources as a single entity. However, in many contexts, performance is not the only metric to consider. When comparing two performance equivalent solutions, their cost becomes an important factor. Distributed systems are usually more expensive to deploy than traditional single-threaded applications. In this work, we build on these considerations by presenting an empirical study that compares the cost of two performance equivalent solutions for a real streaming data analysis task for the Telecommunication industry. The first solution is built on popular distributed processing engines (Apache Spark), while the second solution is a single-threaded application built on an home-brew stream processing framework (Natron). We show that, in the case of continuous analysis, the benefits of distributed processing are outvalued by the distributed data ingestion costs. This is also the case for periodic analysis. However, if data ingestion costs are fixed and small, we show that the most cost-effective solution depends on the dataset size.