Amazon has announced Timestream, a fully-managed time series database service that is based on open source InfluxDB.
But what is a time series ?

A formal definition would sound like:

 "A time series is a sequence of data points reported at a       consistent interval over time".

In a more straightforward manner, time series represent how something changes over time, tracking a metric of some sort.
That something could be anything; the real time location of a car, the amount of energy consumed, when a sale or transaction has been done, etc.

To visualize it, imagine a graph with two axis; the x-axis plots the time and the y-axis plots the metric. Note that a time series records inserts, whilst considering updates as inserts too, as such it plots a continuous line of events taking place over time.

Where can this be useful? By observing the time series companies can derive useful insights to make data-informed decisions and forecasts. For instance

• Walmart by analyzing sales data, can guess future demand
  
  
• Netflix analyzes several data points while a member is viewing a title, which are stored as viewing records to provide real time accurate bookmarks and personalized recommendations.
  
  
• E-commerce platforms use live customer interactions to adjust promotions.

Other areas where time-series can be applied on are sales forecasting, inventory management, forecasting disease outbreaks, financial market data, IoT sensor data and real-time dashboards.

Of course you need somewhere to store, manage and query those data, as such the advent of the time series databases. The most famous are Timescale and Influxdb. Now Amazon turns InfluxDB into a managed service with Timestream, to make it easy for application developers and DevOps teams to run InfluxDB databases on AWS for real-time time-series applications using open-source APIs. Timestream offers the functionalities of the InfluxDB 2.7 release and adds the capabilities of a managed service, such as Multi-AZ high availability.

The managed aspect means that with a few simple API calls, you can set up, migrate, operate, and scale an InfluxDB database on AWS with automated software patching, backups, and recovery.

You can set up a Timestream instance from the AWS Management console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS CloudFormation (AWS CFN).

For instance:

• Navigate to Timestream in the AWS console.
  
  
• Select the option to create a new InfluxDB instance.
  
  
• Configure your instance settings, including instance sizes, storage options, access policies, and availability policies

Within minutes, your new InfluxDB instance will be provisioned and ready to use, allowing you to begin ingesting and analyzing time-series data with ease.

More Information

TimeStream 

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