InfluxData Releases Serverless Time Series Database for Cloud -- ADTmag

InfluxData Releases Serverless Time Series Database for Cloud

By Richard Seeley
September 23, 2019

With the release of the latest version of its InfluxDB product, InfluxData is promising ease-of-use for developers, as well as elastic scalability and advanced analytics capabilities for processing data streaming from IoT and other sources.

The San Francisco-based company said the new InfluxDB Cloud 2.0 released this month, is "the first serverless time series platform, purpose-built to meet the specialized requirements of today's time-sensitive workloads." The company defines a time series database (TSDB) as being designed specifically for time-stamped or time series information. "Time series data are simply measurements or events that are tracked, monitored, down-sampled, and aggregated over time," a press release for the new version explained.

InfluxDB Cloud 2.0 is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that the company says developers can use in applications that need to make sense of the growing zettabytes of data coming from Inernet of Things (IoT) sensors, containers, microservices and other sources. "Most of this is time-stamped data generated at high-frequency and in great volumes that requires rapid ingestion and real-time querying to extract maximum value," the product announcement explained. "Relational and non-serverless databases and monitoring services struggle to handle the scale of these workloads in a cost-effective manner."

The new release includes a data scripting and query language dubbed Flux, which is designed for applications that extract insights from data, spot anomalies and provide real-time alerts and notifications so users can take actions on the information. "The new user interface and getting-started process were designed around developer happiness and faster time to productivity, and include native client library collections and pre-built dashboards and scripts for common monitoring projects, such as Docker, Kubernetes, Nginx, Redis and more," according to the announcement.

Rick Spencer, a developer who works for InfluxData, said the ease-of-use of the product was the reason he took the job he has. "I love InfluxDB, and joined the company because it is so easy and fun to use while also being a battle-hardened production database," he wrote in a recent blog on prototyping IoT applications.

It only takes a few minutes to set up monitoring and alerting notifications with InfluxDB Cloud 2.0 writes Katy Farmer, developer advocate at InfluxData, in another recent blog. "Notifications are the way we find out about the checks our system is running. We receive notifications by configuring a notification endpoint (like Slack)," she wrote. Her blog illustrates how this can be done with mouse clicks through an interface that provide helpful hints as the developer moves through the process.

InfluxData also included quotes in the press release supporting the developer ease-of-use positioning for the new PaaS offering.

"Flux is an incredibly powerful and flexible data manipulation language," said Cullen Murphy, site reliability engineer at Particle, an IoT products company. "It's more intuitive and easier to use than SQL because it focuses on data flow instead of data outcomes. Flux makes it easy to join data from any number of measurements, saving time and providing deeper insights for solving mission-critical issues in real time."

"Time series data is becoming increasingly important across a range of applications, notably operational and IoT analytics. Cloud and web developers today expect convenient access to specialist data engines," James Governor, analyst and co-founder at RedMonk, said in the press release. "InfluxDB Cloud 2.0 is designed for developer experience, to make time series data easier to work with."

"We are in the business of creating a better email experience for our customers," stated Dylan Ferreira, lead site reliability engineer at FuseMail. "InfluxDB Cloud 2.0 features a unified API, for seamless integration of our applications across all environments. We can now react faster to changes in customer demand on our application, which helps us to meet customer SLAs."

The company said developers can get started with the new product for free here.

Later this year it will also be available as an integrated solution on the Google Cloud Platform, the company said.