Amazon Timestream time series database generally available
AWS continues to grow its portfolio of cloud database services, as the Amazon Timestream database emerges out of preview to help serve the growing market demand for time series databases.
AWS announced the general availability of its Amazon Timestream service this week, expanding the cloud giant's roster of databases with a time series database offering.
Amazon Timestream has been in preview at AWS since it was first announced at the company's re:Invent 2018 conference. Timestream is a time series database, which are designed to handle data in chronological order. Amazon Timestream is also a serverless database, with recent data stored in memory to help accelerate data queries.
There is growing interest in the use of time series databases, according to Merv Adrian, research vice president of data and analytics at Gartner.
"We are seeing increasing numbers of organizations in financial services, manufacturing and other industries developing event processing systems based on the ingestion of large amounts of time-series data, with requirements for built-in analytics functions that make it simpler to identify trends and patterns than is possible with non-purpose-built products," Adrian said.
He added that he expects Amazon Timestream to compete with InfluxDB and QuasarDB, as AWS makes use of its autoscaling capabilities and integration with other offerings in its cloud stack.
Amazon Timestream integrates with other services in the AWS cloud stack to receive event streaming data and then send to other services for usage and analysis.
Amazon Timestream has improved over its two-year preview
According to Shawn Bice, vice president of databases at AWS, the company worked with preview customers to improve the service over the past two years to make sure that it addresses operational requirements of time series database users. Bice said that now that Timestream is out of preview, AWS will be able to work with more users on building out and improving the service.
We are seeing increasing numbers of organizations in financial services, manufacturing and other industries developing event processing systems based on the ingestion of large amounts of time-series data.
Merv AdrianResearch vice president, Gartner
He added that Amazon Timestream is serverless from a customer perspective because they can use the service to gain scalability and increase storage and query processing independently, without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. Additionally, while some AWS databases are based on open source technology, Timestream is not.
Connecting Amazon Timestream to event streaming sources
Time series data can come from different sources and can in turn be used by different applications. Bice said that there are multiple integrations with different services at AWS to support data coming in and out of Timestream.
In terms of getting event streaming data into Amazon Timestream, Bice said there is an integration with the Amazon Kinesis event streaming service. Beyond the pre-built integrations that AWS itself provides, Bice said organizations can build their own integrations thanks to support for Amazon Timestream in AWS software development kits (SDKs).
Looking forward, Bice didn't provide any specific direction on what's next for Timestream, though he added that the overall product roadmap at AWS is primarily driven by customer feedback, and Amazon Timestream is no different.
