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Influxdb made the switch from Go to Rust

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Re: Influxdb made the switch from Go to Rust

#21

Post by iworshipfaangs2 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #8
vb-8448 wrote: post #3

Can someone explain what's the InfluxData's market? Or how they make/plan to make money? If we speak about metrics, Prometheus just win.

I see Influx pop up a lot in communities like Home Assistant for doing time series data collection. I'm using Postgres for that myself (not a great experience but I knew that when I was too lazy to find alternatives during setup) but people seem very pleased with its performance. I imagine similar dashboard services that don't necessarily work well in Prometheus are a good market for these types of databases. Prometh…

Do you know if there is any particular advantage of Influx over Prometheus for IOT stuff? I also have noticed that Influx is way more popular in that space, but I don’t know whether the reasons are technical or just social (more tutorials, more shared experience, etc).

Re: Influxdb made the switch from Go to Rust

#22

Post by 46Bit »

iworshipfaangs2 wrote: post #21
jeroenhd wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see Influx pop up a lot in communities like Home Assistant for doing time series data collection. I'm using Postgres for that myself (not a great experience but I knew that when I was too lazy to find alternatives during setup) but people seem very pleased with its performance. I imagine similar dashboard services that don't necessarily work well in Prometheus are a good market for these types of databases. Prometh…

Do you know if there is any particular advantage of Influx over Prometheus for IOT stuff? I also have noticed that Influx is way more popular in that space, but I don’t know whether the reasons are technical or just social (more tutorials, more shared experience, etc).

Influx is a full time series database. It's less opinionated than Prometheus.

Re: Influxdb made the switch from Go to Rust

#26

Post by mnahkies »

mardifoufs wrote: post #7

I love influx but damn do they like moving (too?) fast and quickly changing stuff. In a way, it's pretty cool since it means that they don't get stuck with bad decisions for backwards compatibility reasons, but it's a bit of a roller coaster for users. Not sure what's the best solution though. Having a "stable" but fundamentally limited product (I guess influxdb v1) or breaking stuff in hopes of ending up with a way…

I've always had a soft spot for influxdb after using it for a self hosted datadog/newrelic etc solution many (6+) years ago with great success. Still use it in conjunction with telegraf and grafana for personal project monitoring, but I've not brought myself to upgrade from the 1.x series.

Hopefully it's improved, but last time I tried upgrading I found the UX in grafana to be subpar on the newer versions, as I recall you lost the autocomplete/UI to build your queries. Obviously grafana is it's own project but feels like they (influx) should invest more resource in areas like this to encourage people to upgrade - if you're going to do major upgrades make sure they have feature parity

Re: Influxdb made the switch from Go to Rust

#27

Post by gabereiser »

vb-8448 wrote: post #3

Can someone explain what's the InfluxData's market? Or how they make/plan to make money? If we speak about metrics, Prometheus just win.

There in lies the problem. With shifting priorities and shifting strategies I don’t see them actually knowing what their market is.

Re: Influxdb made the switch from Go to Rust

#30

Post by brabel »

zzzeek wrote: post #9

> So this isn't the approach I'd recommend for this kind of project, but we started fresh from scratch. wow, the from scratch rewrite. I can't even imagine that for a major piece of software

The author was looking for an excuse to use Rust for something since 2018:

https://www.influxdata.com/blog/rust-can-be-difficult-to-lea...

The rewrite started in 2020... they rationalize now, but it's pretty clear they just really wanted Rust and found the reasons they list later as a post-decision justification. Nothing wrong with that, if you don't mind risking the future of your business on a risky rewrite... though if I had a job working on the Go code base and my employer suddenly announced we should drop everything and start a rewrite, so go learn Rust, which has a much smaller job pool in my area as far as I can see, I guess I would've been really pissed off and would leave as fast as possible.

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