InfluxDB 2.0 Open Source Beta Released

By Russ Savage / Product, Use Cases, Developer
Jan 08, 2020

Today we announce InfluxDB 2.0 Open Source’s official move to Beta. This represents a huge step forward from where we started out nearly a year ago and is one step closer to general availability. You can download the latest version on our downloads page.

Since we announced the first Alpha for InfluxDB 2.0 back in January ‘19, we have been working hard to build out and harden InfluxDB 2.0’s capabilities. We appreciate all the feedback from our users over the last year and realize that getting to the Beta stage has taken longer than any of us predicted. Today’s move to Beta signals that we are ready for larger and more complex workloads as we continue to actively engage our community to build the world’s best time series platform.

What can users expect in Beta?

Generally speaking, users can expect fewer breaking changes and an overall more reliable experience when using InfluxDB 2.0 Beta. We still do not recommend this for production environments and users may find issues that cause all or parts of the platform to become unusable or crash from time to time. That being said, we encourage anyone using the Beta to join our Slack Community so we can actively triage and fix any issues of this nature. As the Beta progresses, you can expect our support via Slack and community channels to improve as we work hard to help users mitigate any breaking changes we introduce.

Wait, what breaking changes are coming?

Yes, until we move to GA, there may still be breaking changes introduced. Some of them we know about already, and some we will find along the way. Here is a short list of the ones we know about that may impact you.

• Flux Experimental Package: If you are using anything in the Experimental package, you will see breaking changes as we promote those to other libraries. We are investigating a deprecation policy to help you stay ahead of this.
• Flux Static Typing: We want to statically type the places we still use dynamic types within the standard library for Flux.
• Flux Remaining Features: We plan to add loops and recursion to Flux as well as error handling. These additions may result in breaking changes depending on the implementation.

What's new in the Beta?

There are some really cool new capabilities in InfluxDB 2.0 Beta. Here are just a few. We’d love to get community feedback on them, so let us know what you think on the InfluxDB GitHub repo.

Configuration as Code using Manifests

Monitoring is more than just a single Dashboard, and Manifests are an easy way for users to build and maintain collections of resources including Dashboards, Alerts, Agent Configurations, and more. With the InfluxDB 2.0 Alpha, a user could always import and export Dashboards and Tasks, but that was just the beginning. We are introducing InfluxDB Manifests as we transition to Beta, and our manifest vision is to provide users a way to transform a general-purpose InfluxDB instance into a specialized monitoring tool at the click of a button.

Flux is faster and more powerful than ever

Our first Alpha shipped with Flux v0.17.0, our new functional data scripting language designed for querying, analyzing, and acting on data, and our Beta is available now with Flux v0.58. There have been over 600 commits since that first Alpha release and we have added tons of new functions and capabilities into the language including conditional statements, the ability to read data from and write data to SQL sources, and functions for predicting and forecasting, just to name a few. Flux is ready for your query workloads, and during the Beta, we will continue our work to improve performance and enhance the developer experience in writing and debugging (see our latest VSCode plugin for example).

Convert InfluxQL Queries to Flux using the Transpiler

InfluxQL is the way users query data from InfluxDB 1.x today, and there are millions of queries running in production today. Manually converting those queries to Flux would be a daunting task, something that we are working to automate. The first step is exposing a way for users to convert their existing InfluxQL queries into Flux that can run on the latest InfluxDB. To that end, we have exposed an API for doing that called Influx Transpile. It’s just a starting point and we are looking for users to post their InfluxQL queries to it and open issues where it doesn’t make sense. We’ll be providing a compatibility mode which allows your existing InfluxQL queries to dynamically run as well.

That’s just a few of the many enhancements we’ve been building into the platform.

We need your feedback!

This is a continuation of a journey we started nearly two years ago. We are an open source company at our core, and our continued open development and iteration is a part of that. Please join us in our Community Slack Channel and help us build amazing software. Our engineering teams are active in those channels and eager to hear from you to incorporate your feedback.