InfluxDB 2.0 Release Candidate Now Available

By Russ Savage / Product
Sep 30, 2020

Today we announce InfluxDB 2.0 Open Source’s first official release candidate (RC). This represents a final version of the software as we move towards general availability.

We appreciate all the feedback from our users over the last few years and realize that getting to this stage has taken longer than any of us predicted. Today’s release of our first RC signals that we are ready for larger and more complex workloads as we move towards a generally available 2.0 and the world’s best time series platform.

What can users expect in the RC?

This release candidate represents the first of many builds as we wind down our alpha and beta program and prepare for a generally available release that is ready for production workloads. Generally speaking, users can expect almost no breaking changes and the same experience they would get when using InfluxDB in production. However, we still do not recommend this yet for production environments and users may find issues that cause all or parts of the platform to become unusable or crash. That being said, we encourage anyone using the RC to join our Slack Community so we can actively triage and fix any issues. 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.

Upgrading from an existing Alpha or Beta

We brought the existing storage engine from InfluxDB 1.8 into the latest RC which has resulted in a stable and reliable build with large amounts of data. This also allows us to support a smooth transition from our existing 1.x community. The unfortunate side effect of those changes means that the data already written into a running InfluxDB 2.0 instance isn’t able to be quickly migrated over.

So if you need existing data from your current InfluxDB 2.0 Alpha or Beta, we first recommend you upgrade to InfluxDB Beta 16, which was the last beta version. From there, you can follow these steps to migrate your resources and data to the latest RC version. If you have any problems, please find us on Slack, and we can help triage them.

If you don’t need your existing data or resources, just fire up the latest RC and start from scratch.

Upgrading from an existing InfluxDB 1.x

First, we are excited you want to upgrade to the latest version of InfluxDB! We want to re-state that although we believe this RC to be stable, we still do not recommend it for production installations.

We are currently in the process of finalizing some of the upgrade tooling to allow for an in-place upgrade from your 1.x instance. Those should be available with RC 1 coming soon. If you’d like to try the latest RC, you can configure your data collector to write data to both your existing 1.x instance (dual write) and the latest RC, or manually load CSV or Line Protocol data using the command line tooling. For more ways to load data into the latest InfluxDB RC, see the write data section of our documentation.

Known breaking changes from the previous Betas

As we mentioned before, the underlying storage engine has been changed in the most recent RC and so you will need to migrate your data over. Some of the other breaking changes that might impact you are:

• The default port has changed from 9999 to 8086.
  • If you have not explicitly set a port number, the RC will start on port 8086. If you would like to use a different port, please use the http-bind-address option.
• The /delete endpoint has been temporarily removed
  • If you were using the delete capability to remove time series data using specific criteria, this endpoint has been disabled for now. Our plan is to re-enable this in a future release after GA.
• Backup/Restore has been temporarily removed
  • Currently, there is no way to do a backup of your data while influxd is running. In order to back up your data, you will need to stop influxd and manually copy the data directory. This will be re-enabled in a future release after GA.

For a full list of the changes for the RC, please check out the changelog.

What's new in the RC?

The RC has some really great new capabilities to make working with your data as easy as possible.

1.x Compatibility APIs including support for InfluxQL

If you are currently using a 3rd party or custom tool to work with your data in InfluxDB using InfluxQL, that tool should still work now that we have added support for InfluxQL from the API. Both the read and write APIs are there, which means all you need to do to leverage the latest InfluxDB RC is to update your security credentials. This replaces any existing InfluxQL support that may have been in the open source tooling.

InfluxDB Templates available in the user interface

You can now harness the power of the community using InfluxDB Templates directly in your browser. InfluxDB Templates are a great way to import pre-configured dashboards, tasks, and alerts for popular technology like Docker or Kubernetes. This allows you to install any of the more than 40 templates from our Community Templates repository or add your own.

Flux is faster and more powerful than ever

The Flux language continues to gain new features and improve performance when working with your data. The latest version has the ability to perform Naive Bayes classifications, profile query performance to find slowdowns, and talk to many external services such as SQLServer, OpsGenie, and BigTable. There’s way too much to list here, so take a look at our Flux documentation for more information.

Our Command Line tooling is also more powerful than ever

Our influx command line tool is the easiest way to interact with the InfluxDB APIs and it supports both InfluxDB Cloud and InfluxDB Open Source. We’ve added a ton of capabilities to the CLI including the ability to define configuration profiles for working with different instances of InfluxDB, the ability to create GitOps workflows using InfluxDB Stacks, and the ability to quickly ingest large amounts of custom CSV data into the platform. If you’re not using the CLI when working with InfluxDB, you’re missing out!

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

We need your feedback!

As we continue to move from RC into general availability of InfluxDB 2.0, we invite you to 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.