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Companies that need to track the performance of assets, services, and products over time — especially on the second-to-second or sub-second scale (down to microseconds) — have probably already heard of InfluxDB, an open source time series database that launched back in 2013 and has been improving steadily with new releases ever since.

Whether it’s tech giants such as PayPal, Cisco, and Adobe monitoring their services, big financial institutions such as Capital One monitoring customer transaction throughput and application health and status, or the Vera C. Rubin Observatory scanning the stars in Chile, or even startups such as telemetrics AI company Ezako, the flexibility of the data that InfluxDB can track over time has propelled this open source code to an integral place among the developer operations teams of more than 2,000 customers around the world.

“We are the most popular time series platform by a pretty wide margin,” said Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData, the San Francisco-based company founded in 2012 that created InfluxDB, in a video conference interview with VentureBeat.

Now InfluxData is partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring a managed service offering to even more customers via Amazon Timestream.

The advantages of a managed service time series database on AWS

While AWS customers could always implement InfluxDB on their own and still can — there’s value in having a paid, managed service offering for those customers who don’t have the time (no pun intended), resources, or attention to get theirs up and running and maintain it the way the creators do.

The launch of Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB marks a significant enhancement in the way developers can interact with time series data. By hosting InfluxDB on AWS, InfluxData and AWS are eliminating the complex management tasks that typically come with running a database. These tasks include installation, upgrades, storage management, replication for high availability, and backups.

The service is designed to handle applications that require millisecond response times, making it ideal for use cases such as real-time alerting and monitoring infrastructure reliability.

“One of the things AWS customers value most is managed open source offerings,” said Brad Bebee, General Manager, Amazon Neptune and Timestream, AWS, in the same video conference interview with VentureBeat. “When considering purposeful databases, we appreciate the open source features of InfluxDB. Customers requested a managed version of these features. At AWS, we provide at least 25 different management resource services and have gained significant insight. We’ve learned that partnering with Influx Data, who knows their product best, allows us to offer the best-managed open source InfluxDB.”

Which customers and which sectors will take advantage of Amazon Timestream of InfluxDB?

Already, AWS and Influx have been offering the managed service version of InfluxDB via Timestream to a select group of private beta customers.

“Prior to the launch of the service, we ran what we internally called a private beta,” confirmed Bebee. “This was internal access only for some customers who were interested in using it. And one of the areas that we saw using it was a lot of energy companies. In many places, power companies provide devices that allow consumers to monitor their energy usage. This transparency helps people make decisions to optimize energy use. In the UK, we’ve seen companies integrate these devices with existing Influx instances, exploring how to coordinate them with a managed AWS service. This is certainly one example we’ve observed.”

Other examples of customers who will find value in the InfluxDB via Timestream offering are likely to be in transportation and fleet management, according to Bebee.

“If you think about electric scooters or electric cars, all of these things have different sensors and devices and things that you want to monitor operationally for the business and from the fleet perspective,” he noted.

In addition, Kaplan told VentureBeat that even “hobbyists at home” find value in InfluxDB when monitoring such infrastructure as their solar panels or temperature, and could likely find value in Timestream for InfluxDB.

“Any engineer that’s trying to make a system smarter and smarter over time,” is part of the potential addressable market both of InfluxDB and the AWS managed service offering, potentially.

At a time when AI large language models (LLMs) and training data are filling up many news and tech headlines, InfluxDB and AWS see real value in promoting their new collaboration.

“Most of the really interesting data is happening in the real world as opposed to the generative world of language models,” Kaplan said.

Pricing for Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB ranges dramatically depending on the data being observed and how frequently, but there’s a lengthy breakdown with examples on the AWS website showing ranges of $373.21 to $11,969.

1. Video Streaming Application Monitoring: $373.21/month.
2. Fraudulent Payment Detection: $1,057.96/month.
3. Real-Time UPS Monitoring (Single-AZ): $737.88/month.
4. IoT Home Security Monitoring (Single-AZ): $3,002.25/month.
5. E-commerce User Behavior Analytics (Single-AZ): $5,984.50/month.
6. Real-Time UPS Monitoring (Multi-AZ): $1,476.49/month.
7. IoT Home Security Monitoring (Multi-AZ): $6,004.50/month.
8. E-commerce User Behavior Analytics (Multi-AZ): $11,969/month.

At a time when AWS continues to fend off a steadily advancing competitor in the form of Microsoft Azure, and is consistently beefing up its AI offerings, the fact that it is also not neglecting time series data and open source tools is notable.