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Amazon Timestream – Fast, scalable, fully managed time series database

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31–40 of 131 posts

Re: Amazon Timestream – Fast, scalable, fully managed time series database

#31
post #17
post #9

Honest question: when dealing with time-series data, do you actually need every data point? Is that level of granularity really necessary? IMO, it makes way more sense to decide the aggregations you want ahead of time (e.g. "SELECT customer, sum(value) FROM purchases GROUP BY customer"). That way, you deal with substantially less data and everything becomes a whole lot simpler.

Really depends on the use case. Working in healthcare, vital signs can be modeled as time series points, but are lower frequency than, say, metrics from servers. However we want to store every point so a spike is not missed. One could argue an unsustained spike is noise, but in the healthcare domain there may be a correlation with some external event (the purpose is surprised and their heart rate spikes).

The clever thing to do in this scenario would be to keep every spike but delete all the data between similar data points after storing. So you get low granularity for identical/nearly-the-same data points and high granularity when something interesting happens. I don't have any experience with time-series data so maybe this is commonplace.

Re: Amazon Timestream – Fast, scalable, fully managed time series database

#32
post #14

jesus christ six amazon articles in a day? AWS is undeniably the body of christ for HN but am i missing something? FSX, blockchain, timestream, Graviton, ground station, and cloudwatch... all of these articles are advertisements for mundane shit.

> all of these articles are advertisements for mundane shit

What do you think hacker news is supposed to be? Anything that isn't mundane to a lot of people isn't interesting enough for those in the target audience. Amazon is having its annual AWS conference and thus has a lot of announcements, of course they have a lot of new niche products.

Re: Amazon Timestream – Fast, scalable, fully managed time series database

#33
post #4

Seems positioned to compete with Azure Data Explorer (MSFT's log/time series optimized service). I know Azure runs a lot of services on top of Data Explorer (previously called Kusto) I wonder if this is a true internal battle tested product or a me-too offering.

Kusto is architecturally closer to Dremel (or BigQuery). It's a columnar compressed datastore with a nice query language. Not the most efficient way to store and query timeseries data though.

Back then (internally) we actually had a lot of issues with ingesting and querying time series data at scale.

Re: Amazon Timestream – Fast, scalable, fully managed time series database

#35
post #19
post #14

jesus christ six amazon articles in a day? AWS is undeniably the body of christ for HN but am i missing something? FSX, blockchain, timestream, Graviton, ground station, and cloudwatch... all of these articles are advertisements for mundane shit.

It's AWS re:Invent day/week. I've never been, but I get the impression that it's like Apple's keynote, or Google I/O, in which big product announcements are made. On those days, you'll see multiple submissions about the respective conferences too.

This is exactly what re:Invent is. Most teams dream of launching a new AWS product at re:Invent (and not missing their date and launching at a later time)

Re: Amazon Timestream – Fast, scalable, fully managed time series database

#36

At my day job, I build a lot of machine learning systems that require data to be fed in a time series manner[1]. Often this means building systems to analyze terabytes of logs [semi]-realtime. All I have to say is - thank god! This is going to make my job a lot easier, and likely empower us to remove our current infrastructure setup. I know at one point we actually considered building our own time series database. In…

I wouldn't jump the gun on this. I've been working within Amazon cloud for years and every year they make massive claims about new services at re:invent. Not saying this isn't going to be a good product, just saying it will probably take a while to be as useful as you're hoping.

Re: Amazon Timestream – Fast, scalable, fully managed time series database

#37
post #24
post #4

Seems positioned to compete with Azure Data Explorer (MSFT's log/time series optimized service). I know Azure runs a lot of services on top of Data Explorer (previously called Kusto) I wonder if this is a true internal battle tested product or a me-too offering.

I might be mistaken but wouldn't Data Explorer be more similar to AWS CloudWatch which has been around for a long time.

Azure Data Explorer/ Kusto is more of a database that is optimized for the log use case than a service. There is a front end tool and a lot of the use-cases are around log management, but it is database you can do general SQL or KQL things with. Time series is one of the core use-cases for it also but it has less marketing around it.

Re: Amazon Timestream – Fast, scalable, fully managed time series database

#38
post #26

I'm actually impressed at how incredibly expensive they made this. $0.50 per million 1KB writes, which is 20x what aurora charges, since aurora allows 8KB writes. And Aurora is already expensive if you actually read/write to it.

I get the feeling this is for important data (banking etc) so I have a feeling this is 200x cheaper than whatever else is available.
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