Timestream, the new AWS Database, is now Generally Available

A time series database (TSDB) is a software system that is optimized for storing and serving time series through associated pairs of time(s) and value(s).

Amazon is expanding its offerings to time series databases which is neither a new technology nor a new market. Nevertheless, this sector has experienced a surprising development and adoption over the last 5 years.

With this new offer, AWS faces some competitors in the same sector, some of them are well known open source technologies such as Prometheus, Timescale, and InfluxDB, others are specialized vendors such as Crate.io. The latter publishes CrateDB, an SQL database for industrial IoT adapted to the real-time management of time series.

In addition, other cloud providers such as Microsoft have also entered this niche with Azure Time Series Insights, presented as an end-to-end IoT analytics platform for monitoring, analyzing, and visualizing industrial IoT data on a large scale. Alibaba Cloud also has an offering featuring its Time Series Database.

According to DB-Engines, this the top 10 most popular time series databases:

1. InfluxDB
2. Kdb+
3. Prometheus
4. Graphite
5. RRDtool
6. TimescaleDB
7. Apache Druid
8. OpenTSDB
9. FaunaDB
10. GridDB

According to AWS, there are 3 main use cases:

IoT: Timestream enables quick analysis of time series data generated by IoT applications using built-in analytic functions such as smoothing, approximation, and interpolation.

DevOps: The managed TSDB is ideal for DevOps solutions that monitor health and usage metrics and analyze data in real-time to improve performance and availability (CPU/memory utilization, network data, and IOPS)

Analytics: Amazon Timestream enables developers to store and analyze data at scale (e.g., clickstream data, path-to-purchase, and shopping cart abandonment rate for e-commerce website..etc).