TL;DR Replication from Edge to Cloud with InfluxDB

By Susannah Brodnitz / Product, Developer, Use Cases
Jun 29, 2022

Bringing edge and cloud together

Depending on your available resources, data analysis can take place at the edge or in the cloud, but businesses don’t need to choose one location over the other. There are benefits to giving the edge autonomy to collect, process, and act on data locally. Data replication helps maintain edge autonomy and makes it easier for users to get the data they need, where they need it. For example, an engineer in a factory might need highly granular, real-time data from their facility to operate the machinery there. Meanwhile, a data scientist at the same company working at a different location might be interested in broader data views from all the company’s factories, so those edge facilities can send less granular data to the cloud to feed those dashboards. Manually transferring large sets of data from the edge to the cloud can be difficult and inefficient. Many businesses want a way to automatically transfer data to the cloud so it’s always up-to-date. Edge data replication does just that. It automatically sends the data you want in the shape you want it, from the edge to the cloud for centralized storage and analysis.

Automatic and durable

Edge data replication makes it easier than ever to tailor data for all the different needs of users. There are many ways to get data from the edge to the cloud. What’s different about InfluxDB’s replication method is that the nodes on the edge replicate automatically, durably, and in real time at the bucket level. Edge data replication creates a queue that syncs automatically, providing durable and reliable data transfers, even with network partitions and network outages. The queue simply picks up where it left off if connection gets interrupted. To implement this method you need to first configure an edge instance of InfluxDB, configure the data you want to replicate to a new bucket, and point the replication bucket to a cloud instance of InfluxDB. You can transform the data before sending it to the cloud to aggregate it, or to enrich it by adding metadata. For example, you can downsample data so you only transfer to the cloud what you actually need there, and cut down on storage costs. Edge data replication makes it easy to transfer data to the cloud. It’s automatic and durable so you can have a tailored dataset exactly where you want it in real time.

Watch this video to learn more.