Webinar Recap: Unleash the Full Potential of Your Time Series Data with InfluxDB and AWS

By Community / Developer
May 29, 2024

Recently, TechCrunch hosted a webinar titled, “Unleash the Full Potential of Your Time Series Data,” featuring a discussion with InfluxData Founder and CTO, Paul Dix, and AWS General Manager for Timestream and Neptune, Brad Bebee, moderated by InfluxData staff engineer, Andrew Lamb.

The trio covered key topics related to time series data, including the unique challenges and benefits of time series databases, how various industries use time series databases, and the specifics of the new joint offering from InfluxData and AWS–Timestream for InfluxDB.

This recap highlights some of the key takeaways from the session.

Takeaways

1. Time series databases are essential for efficient data management and analytics

One of the key points touched on in the session was the importance of time series databases in managing and analyzing large volumes of data. Time series databases are not just for storing data but also for optimizing performance, improving user experience, enhancing security, and reducing costs. InfluxDB is purpose-built to handle the unique challenges of time series data, including high volumes of data, high ingestion rates, and the need to aggregate and analyze data over time.

“Time series lets you do that, and what I see is that there’s so many applications of time series that it’s beyond where you kind of think of it. Normally, it’s into low Earth orbit space satellites, it’s into streaming video,” said Bebee.

Dix added, “Sometimes these observations look like metrics that are sampled at fixed intervals, but sometimes the observations are literally like log lines or individual events on a machine and things like that.”

2. The AWS and InfluxDB partnership enhances time series database management

The partnership between AWS and InfluxDB led to the development of a new offering called Timestream for InfluxDB. This managed service combines the benefits of open source InfluxDB with the convenience and efficiency of a managed service on AWS. It allows users to focus more on building and using their time series data to gain insights into their business, rather than managing and operating their databases.

Bebee explained, “So the benefit of a managed database service, and the AWS-managed InfluxDB service [Timestream for InfluxDB], is that you can free up the time that you’re spending managing your servers, managing the database, patching backups, maintenance, windows, and you can spend more time building and using your time series data to get insights into your business.”

Dix added, “I think if you’re on AWS and you want InfluxDB 2.x, it doesn’t make sense to run it yourself. It just makes more sense to run the AWS service.”

3. AWS-managed InfluxDB offers scalability, operational efficiency, and data protection

Timestream for InfluxDB offers a host of benefits, including scalability, operational efficiency, and data protection. It supports high availability configurations, allowing users to scale their query throughput. This feature is currently being enhanced to allow users to scale ‌read throughput using servers in other availability zones, speeding up the failover process.

For data protection, Bebee detailed the data protection features of the AWS-managed InfluxDB service, which includes encrypted volumes and backups, support for encryption in transit, tools for rotating credentials, and automated service backups and restoration capabilities.

4. InfluxDB 3.x opens time series to advanced analytics

The conversation shifted to the latest iteration of InfluxDB, v3. Dix discussed the open source technologies that underpin InfluxDB 3.0, the goals Influx had in mind when re-writing the core database, and many of the advantages that version 3 has over previous versions. This includes support for SQL queries and the ability to handle extremely high-resolution data without sacrificing performance.

InfluxData is currently working on the open source version of InfluxDB 3.x,, which will be available on AWS as soon as possible. (The current default for Timestream for AWS is InfluxDB v2.x.)

Notable quotes

• “Understanding time series and how the measurements are changing over time is really fundamental to getting an insight into what’s going on in your systems.” - Brad Bebee

• “The scale of time series data is just way, way bigger than what you see in traditional OLTP workloads.” - Paul Dix

• “If you have a machine that you’re operating and you care about the efficiency of its use and its continued health, then you are probably going to be creating, collecting, analyzing and keeping track of a lot of time series data.” - Paul Dix

• “Customers really love managed open source databases and managed open source AWS services.” - Brad Bebee

• “We support Parquet. One of the other things we’re excited about is Apache Iceberg, which we’re going to be supporting later this year.” - Paul Dix

Next steps

To learn more about the AWS/InfluxData partnership, watch the webinar recording. To start using InfluxDB, check out the different options now available.