More than four years ago, we launched InfluxDB, an open source time series platform. In the years since, time series technology has become increasingly popular; according to DB-Engines, over the last 24 months time series has been the fastest growing database category. This popularity is fueled by the “sensorification” of the physical world (i.e., IoT) and the rapidly increasing instrumentation requirements of the next generation of software. InfluxDB has millions of downloads, an expanding list of enterprise customers and a growing community that is always finding new ways to deploy and build on our platform and we believe we are just scratching the surface.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently entered the market with Timestream, a hosted time series database. We have been evangelizing the importance of high compression, super fast engines and a purpose-built stack for time series data and Amazon seems to have followed this model pretty closely. We are excited to have more competition in the market, as it affirms the broader market opportunity and further validates the need for robust, purpose-built solutions such as InfluxData. Amazon makes smart and strategic moves and we know that when it enters a new space, it’s not done so haphazardly—there is a lot of thought and research that goes into identifying the commercial potential, so its play in the time series database space is further evidence of what we already knew: that building a time series platform on existing multipurpose SQL or NoSQL databases is a nonstarter for a modern enterprise. AWS is a bedrock of the modern cloud-based internet and we are excited to see how Timestream evolves.
Public details about Timestream’s technical capabilities are limited, but based on the AWS model, there are likely several significant differences between our offerings—enough to appeal to distinct developers and use cases. Among them:
Open source — We are first and foremost an open source company. We are committed to sharing ideas and information openly, collaborating on solutions and providing full transparency to drive innovation. InfluxData’s products are continuously improved by an energized group of developers that help to make them more reliable, secure and awesome. The power of the open source community to drive innovation is unsurpassed by any proprietary software solutions.
Hybrid cloud and on-premises support — Distributing assets on any or across multiple cloud-hosting environments is often the best choice for companies. Key among the advantages is avoiding vendor lock-in, which can limit the ability to customize systems and negotiate better rates, ultimately making it very difficult—and expensive—to change cloud providers to meet ever-evolving business and technical needs. Every business has specific functionalities and a hybrid cloud system offers the flexibility to choose services that best fit their needs, whether it’s to support GDPR regulatory requirements or teams that are spread across multiple providers. And from an operations perspective, a multi-cloud system increases efficiencies and provides another layer of security to ensure there is no downtime.
Inevitably, as recognition of the power of time series data becomes more prominent, we’ll see even more competitors enter the space. And this is great from our perspective: Not only does competition fuel innovation, it grows the market as a whole. More importantly, it keeps us vigilant and focused on delivering value for the developers and those in the DevOps space who solve real-world problems with our platform.
Our priorities remain the same and we will proceed on the track we’re laying for the future. We will continue to push the edge with this technology—leveraging the advantages of a purpose-built system, developing new languages, supporting new platforms and new workloads and pursuing exciting opportunities as they come. We are committed to having a project with velocity, investing in the platform to make it successful and in the community of creative and talented developers who are discovering new ways to deploy our time series platform every day.
InfluxDB is available now and we encourage developers, both existing users and those who are just learning about the power of time series databases, to download and get up and running in minutes.
