Announcing Timescale Cloud: The first fully-managed time-series database service that runs on AWS, GCP, and Azure

Today we are thrilled to announce the general availability of Timescale Cloud, the first fully-managed, multi-cloud time-series database service that runs on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Timescale Cloud gives developers the freedom to deploy and migrate time-series workloads across a variety of regions around the world -- on the cloud provider of their choice -- with just a few clicks.

Timescale Cloud delivers fully-managed instances of TimescaleDB (powered by PostgreSQL) with a clean & simple experience for your time-series workloads. It’s fully production ready with built-in high-availability, automated monitoring, automated backups, and point-in-time restore.

Feature highlights include:

• Starts at $3.86/day on your cloud provider of choice (AWS, GCP, Azure) -- that’s less than an SF cup of coffee.
• Store and analyze time-series data using TimescaleDB’s advanced time-series analytical functions and automated data management capabilities with SQL (eg interpolation, data retention policies, automated aggregates).
• Visualize your data with fully-managed Grafana instances, or connect with any of our compatible third-party viz tools (eg Tableau, PowerBI, Superset).
• Seamlessly scale up, scale down, or even scale out via read replicas or database forks (eg useful to populate development or data science environments).
• (Scroll to the bottom of this post to see even more features, or register for the upcoming webinar on Timescale Cloud.)

SIGN UP HERE to get started today! When you do, you’ll receive $300 in trial credits (no credit card required, available for a limited time).

There’s a lot you can build (The sky’s the limit when you’re in the cloud)

When you combine the power of SQL with time-series, there’s a lot you can build:

• Monitor the temperature of your room with Prometheus and TimescaleDB
• Monitor network traffic for content filtering and threat protection
• Store application logs in TimescaleDB/PostgreSQL
• Analyze security vulnerability events using TimescaleDB with Kafka and Grafana
• Analyze Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrency data
• Measure publication views over time and other usage stats for a new lightweight publishing platform
• Ingest CDN data from Kafka to TimescaleDB
• Measure and monitor particle pollution sensor data using TimescaleDB and Grafana
• (and more!)

Thank you to our Timescale Cloud Beta users

We’d like to take a moment to thank our users who joined us for the Timescale Cloud Beta & Preview these past several months and provided valuable feedback:

“The Lavoro integrated platform solution required a database capable of easily scaling to support our growing data volumes and historical and/or real-time analytics. After evaluating a number of database solutions, we selected TimescaleDB, which operates at the edge, and Timescale Cloud. The flexibility of SQL and its broad ecosystem allowed Lavoro to easily integrate TimescaleDB into our platform. Timescale continues to refine its advanced support for time-series data management, which is a major benefit for Lavoro customers today and into the future.” ‌‌- Brandon Davis, Chief Technology Officer, Lavoro Technologies

“We are consistently capturing and analyzing a lot of network data, WiFi sessions, and DNS logs, which by nature have a time component. We were very excited to find TimescaleDB because it provides advanced time-series functions that can be used with SQL and is compatible with our systems. Having TimescaleDB available as a managed cloud service make operations much simpler.” - Keegan McCallum, Head of Engineering, Colony Networks

“We started exploring TimescaleDB a year ago and have been using it ever since. The ease of installation and time-series features have simplified our collection and storage of real-time information. Having to deal with millions of objects every minute at Yottaa can get complicated; Timescale's flexible Hypertable architecture simplifies controlling data retention automatically and creating continuous aggregations. Timescale Cloud can serve to further reduce our operational overhead.” - Bob Buffone, CTO, Yottaa

More cost-effective than alternatives

With Timescale Cloud we are building not just the easiest time-series experience, but we have also made the service even more cost-effective versus other managed time-series offerings.

Take Amazon Timestream, announced just last year. At first glance, Timestream pricing may seem reasonable. But if you apply its pricing against even modest real-world time-series workloads, you’ll see Timescale Cloud is much more cost-effective.

For example, let’s say you have a workload with the following characteristics: 1,000 writes per second, a 30 day retention policy, and 60 queries a minute (eg if there are multiple dashboards and applications pointed at the data). Then, depending on your query patterns, you’ll spend anywhere between $113/day (for shallow queries only scanning 30 minutes of data at a time) to $1357/day (for deep queries scanning 6 hours of data at a time). The equivalent Timescale Cloud machine type deployed on AWS would only cost $13.90/day (I/O optimized, 512GB Storage, 15GB RAM, 2 vCPUs).

In other words, AWS Timestream is 10x-100x more expensive than Timescale Cloud.

(For full transparency, we’ve documented our calculations in this public spreadsheet. Please feel free to double-check our math, or even copy this spreadsheet and change the parameters to suit your own workloads.)

Open-source is the future of software development and cloud is the future of software delivery

While we are excited to announce Timescale Cloud, we are equally excited to share why this launch is particularly important given broader trends.‌‌‌‌We live in a fascinating time in the software industry. We are witness to the rise of open-source at the expense of proprietary software. We see the cloud delivery model, whether it be IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS, become so dominant that AWS has been able to build a $30-billion-dollar-a-year business. We also have seen friction between the public clouds and open-source companies play out in the form of alternative licensing models.

Through all of this, one thing is clear: open-source is the future of software development and cloud is the future of software delivery.

Open-source software is just better for developers and enterprises: it is free, it is developed out in the open (which leads to better code quality), it provides deployment and code flexibility, and it matures and is hardened at a scale that no proprietary software or service can match. The heart of its success is that open source builds communities -- and collaborative communities don’t just produce fewer bugs, but also better things.

A managed cloud service makes open-source software even better: it relieves the burden of software management and operations (eg uptime, backups, updates) and frees developers to focus on their core applications.

Open-source software enables developers to build applications that are cloud portable and avoid vendor lock-in. But as more workloads move to the cloud, and the public cloud companies become more dominant, how do software developers avoid building an application that only runs on a single cloud, which is just another form of vendor lock-in?

Freedom of deployment choice empowers software developers

At Timescale, we have recognized these dynamics for a while now. Our mission is to build the easiest, fastest, most-reliable, and most cost-effective place to store and analyze time-series data. When we first launched over two years ago, “easiest” primarily meant “full SQL” -- we saw no point in forcing developers to teach themselves and their colleagues a new query language. We also recognized that building on PostgreSQL meant that the operational experience can be something that is tried-and-true vs. having to learn to manage something unproven and new, or even forcing one to manage a complex polyglot system of relational metadata and time series data in different siloed systems. We realized that by building on top of PostgreSQL, we could offer simplicity at scale.

Today, millions of downloads later, we are extending that principle of simplicity by eliminating the hassle of managing and operating a database, all while giving users the freedom to work with the cloud service provider of their choice. Timescale Cloud amplifies the power of TimescaleDB by making it even easier to use.

We believe the cloud freedom that Timescale Cloud provides is a necessary step in the right direction to empower the developer.

With Timescale Cloud, some of you may ask: are the public clouds now your vendor, partner, or competitor?

Our answer? Yes.‌‌‌‌

Today’s complicated reality means that to the public clouds we are sometimes a customer (eg Timescale Cloud deployed on AWS, Azure, or GCP), a partner (eg TimescaleDB with Azure Database for PostgreSQL), and a competitor (eg Timescale Cloud versus public cloud time-series offerings).

At the end of the day, our goal is simple: to provide the best time-series experience to software developers and their organizations. Software developers want optionality, and we are here to serve their time-series needs however and wherever they need them.

Building this optionality also means empowering others in our community: for example, public cloud providers offering managed TimescaleDB OSS (eg Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Alibaba Cloud, Digital Ocean), monitoring tools (eg Grafana, Zabbix, Sensu), and others (eg Seeq, PostgREST, SeveralNines).

Want an open-source or free version? Sure. Want to pay for the benefits in Enterprise? Sure. On premise? Check. Edge? Check. Public Clouds? Check. Fully-managed cloud service? Check.

Get started with Timescale Cloud today

Getting started with Timescale Cloud is incredibly easy.

Timescale Cloud is available today to customers across the globe. By signing up, you’ll automatically receive access to the features and capabilities in TimescaleDB Enterprise. Plus we’ll give you $300 in free trial credits to start (no credit card required, available for a limited time), which can be applied to any service plan configuration (from Dev to Pro).

Once you exceed those free credits, Timescale Cloud offers a pay-as-you-go model with the flexibility to cancel at anytime.

SIGN UP HERE to get started today!

For even more information, register for our upcoming webinar on Timescale Cloud.

And if you have any other questions, please feel free to ping us on Community Slack or Contact Us. We’re here to help.

Expanded Timescale Cloud Feature List