Placement of services in stream computing applications

A computer-implemented method for processing streaming data, comprising:

• receiving a stream of tuples to be processed by a plurality processing elements executing on two or more compute nodes, each compute node having one or more processors and a memory to store one or more of the processing elements, each processing element including one or more stream operators, wherein each stream operator is connected to at least one other stream operator and the stream operators define an operator graph having one or more execution paths corresponding with one or more flows of tuples between the stream operators;
• determining whether an overhead parameter associated with a first streams service located at a first stream operator is outside of a first overhead criterion;
• and
• ending the first streams service at the first stream operator, and
• instantiating a second streams service at a second stream operator in the operator graph when the overhead parameter associated with the first streams service is outside of the first overhead criterion, wherein the second stream operator is different from the first stream operator.