InfluxDB goes live on Google Cloud
Google Cloud Whitepapers
In a long-awaited move, time-series database provider InfluxDB announced the general availability of its managed cloud service on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The highlights of the release are that the offering is serverless and that it is part of GCP's open-source umbrella that features unified billing and support (that will come soon), joint marketing, and integration with other parts of the Google cloud portfolio including Cloud Bigtable and PubSub, plus Stackdriver for monitoring.
InfluxDB has been quite public about its second-generation public cloud rollout, announcing its strategy last spring, and going live on the AWS marketplace last fall. The features of InfluxDB services on AWS and GCP will be comparable, with the difference being the integration to other GCP services.
This is not the first go-round in the cloud for Influx, as the first iteration was on its legacy platform and was not serverless. The new 2.0 platform, still in beta, was a major rearchitecting of the database, decoupling the query language from the database and replacing it with a more visually-oriented one, and consolidating all the open-source projects related to the database into a unified API.
And it's a market that's still unfurling. We reviewed the state of the competition last spring. Amazon's own entry Timestream, for instance, is still in preview more than a year after it was first unfurled. GCP represents an opportunity to leverage a broader stack. Data can be drawn from Bigtable, while PubSub can be used as both a source and outlet for InfluxDB data.
The InfluxDB 2.0 service that is now live on AWS and GCP was built from the ground up as truly cloud-native, running as a stateful application inside Kubernetes. That enables the platform to operate serverless, which can be a key advantage as time-series data often is associated with use cases that have highly spikey workloads.
On tap this year, InfluxDB will finally usher the full general release of the 2.0 platform and offer a more convenient way of packaging Flux artifacts such as code, dashboard or alerting rules for execution. The next milestone will be Azure where the InfluxDB offering is still the first generation platform. We expect that 2.0 will come to Azure later this year.