How Open Source and Time Series Data Fit Together

The race to bring data into development is here. We see it in many ways, most noticeably in the increasing relevance of time series databases.
Time series databases record time stamps from servers and sensors and allow data to be collected and saved. InfluxDB, from InfluxData, is one of the leading open source time series database technology providers. The company is now partnering with Amazon Web Services to provide a managed open source service for time series database services.
In this episode of The New Stack Makers, Brad Bebee, general manager of Amazon Neptune and Mimestream at Amazon Web Services, said that before launching the service, the AWS team actively sought feedback from several customers who were running open source Influx database instances.
Bebee and Paul Dix, co-founder and CTO of InfluxData, told the Makers audience that they appreciated InfluxDB’s open source API and performance, but managing it was a challenge, Bebee acknowledged. To address this, they initiated a private beta with several companies, offering a managed service to alleviate the burden of database management based on the customers’ needs and preferences.
What Amazon Timestream Does
InfluxDB, which was introduced in 2013, is an open source time series database useful for measurement, metrics, sensor data and anything you want to track over time and get a real-time view of what’s happening in sensors, systems, servers or applications. Influx offers an open source MIT license and also offers a commercial product, a fork of the open source version.
Amazon Timestream is an AWS-managed time series database service. AWS offers two different database engines. It has something called TimesTen for Live Analytics, which is a serverless time series database. AWS recently announced Timestream for InfluxDB, a managed version of the open source InfluxDB time series database.
The fit with Influx and AWS is based on the interest in time series databases and open source, Bebee said.
“The first is the time series itself,” he said. “When I think about a problem, or understanding what’s going on in a system, the first thing I start to do is take observations and measure things over time. And that’s fundamentally what time series is. So there’s even more and more applications for time series. We see that as a very interesting and growing space.
“And the second is that customers love managed open source databases. AWS offers more than 25 different managed open source services. What we found is that customers wanted APIs and performance that they get from the open source packages. And so combining that with our managed service, we thought it made a lot of sense for our customers. That would really help customers who want to use time series databases.”