
Announcing Timescale Cloud - bsg75
https://blog.timescale.com/timescale-cloud-first-fully-managed-time-series-database-service-runs-on-aws-gcp-azure/
======
nodesocket
I've been ingesting stock market trading data into MongoDB and using
Metabase[1] to visualize it. It is essentially date, price, volume, ticker
symbol, exchange. Around 400M documents so far.

Queries out of Metabase take upwards of 2-5 minutes to run even simple
questions like:

    
    
       Plot the average price of Apple for the last 5 days grouping by minute.
    

Would Timescale Cloud be a better replacement in terms of performance? Is
there a nice GUI visualization platform like Metabase for it?

[1] [https://metabase.com/](https://metabase.com/)

~~~
DenseComet
Hey I was wondering how you ingest stock market data. What source do you use,
and do you use a connector, or did you write one yourself?

~~~
nodesocket
I use Alpaca[1], specifically the Node.js `websocket.onStockTrades` method and
a bit of custom JavaScript code.

[1] [https://github.com/alpacahq/alpaca-trade-api-
js](https://github.com/alpacahq/alpaca-trade-api-js)

~~~
dianasaur323
Very cool! I haven't been able to find a more real-time data source yet.
Thanks for sharing!

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contrahax
"Powered by Aiven" \+ nearly identical interface, so this is kind of a
reselling arrangement? Aiven supports timescale on postgres, so what
additional features does Timescale Cloud provide?

~~~
derefr
One main difference in these sorts of arrangements is vertically-integrated
support.

If your Aiven database is having Timescale architecture problems, your support
contact is someone working for Aiven who would need to turn around and reach
out to Timescale about the bug (or suggest that you do so.)

If your Timescale Cloud database is having Timescale architecture problems,
your support contact is someone working at Timescale who can just call over
the guy who wrote the code with the bug in it.

(On the other hand, if your problem is with the Aiven backing cluster, it'll
presumbly take slightly longer for Timescale Cloud to resolve, given that
they'd have to bounce that forward.)

~~~
akulkarni
In this case we (Timescale) are your main line of support. Our job is for you
to have a 100% positive experience on Timescale Cloud. The buck, as it were,
stops with us.

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solidasparagus
Is there any autoscaling or pay-for-what-you-use pricing? It's not 100% clear,
but it looks you essentially choose the instance type you want when using
Timescale Cloud.

I understand why you might not want to call that out specifically in these
promotional materials, but it's an important consideration when choosing which
managed DB to use and when evaluating cost.

What specifically does this mean in practice - "Grow, shrink and migrate your
workloads between configurations and plans with ease."

~~~
dianasaur323
It's more like pay-for-what-you use. You can check out the pricing calculator
for more detail: [https://www.timescale.com/cloud-
pricing](https://www.timescale.com/cloud-pricing)

Growing, shrinking, and migrating involve moving to a different instance type,
so you have to select a different instance type. That being said, there is
very very little downtime (on the order of 3-5 seconds while the DNS resolves)

~~~
solidasparagus
Thanks for the clarifications, that's helpful.

I wouldn't call it pay-for-what-you-use unless the pricing varies with your
actual usage instead of changing when you change plans.

~~~
dianasaur323
Interesting point of view - it's certainly always a bit hard to find the right
verbage that everyone can understand, but hopefully this discussion clarified
things!

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dkersten
Last time I used a traditional hosting provider, I could get a new bare metal
server setup in under half an hour. I would hardly call them _" pay what you
use"_ even though I could start and stop servers and change the plan I'm on
and still be only two to three times slower than doing the same on AWS.

~~~
dianasaur323
Certainly - I've been seeing a bunch of usage based pricing that price on a
different metric (like metrics per second) etc.

Regardless, with Timescale Cloud, if you get a machine, you pay the price for
that machine for as long as you use it. So I guess to avoid the confusion, we
can call this just paying for the machine :)

~~~
dkersten
By the way, I've recently started using TimescaleDB (past month or two) for
processing cryptocurrency trading information and I'm liking it a lot so far.
I love that I can use Postgres as normal, but have efficient time-based
queries.

My first ever test query was to generate minutely OHLC+volume from
time,price,quantity trades. It was pleasantly easy to do:

    
    
        select time_bucket('1 minutes', time) as minutely, 
               max(price) as high,
               min(price) as low,
               first(price, time) as open,
               last(price, time) as close,
               sum(quantity) as volume
          from trades
        group by minutely
        order by minutely;
    

[https://gist.github.com/danielytics/e9b69933586e00732646e016...](https://gist.github.com/danielytics/e9b69933586e00732646e01657dde128)

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savrajsingh
This is cool, is there a guide to migrate from influxDB? Mostly interested in
the cost savings.

~~~
dianasaur323
We haven't done a formal price comparison, since it's actually a bit hard to
compare apples to apples since the two databases are architected differently.
Definitely something we should consider doing! Thanks for the idea.

Migration wise, I would use Outflux for batch migration and Telegraf to
support a live migration
([https://docs.timescale.com/v1.3/tutorials/outflux](https://docs.timescale.com/v1.3/tutorials/outflux))
and ([https://docs.timescale.com/v1.3/tutorials/telegraf-output-
pl...](https://docs.timescale.com/v1.3/tutorials/telegraf-output-plugin)).

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mharroun
It seems disingenuous to call it the first. AWS has it's own time series db.
In terms of open source Apache druid had a managed cloud variant that imply.io
runs.

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akulkarni
It’s the first multi-cloud.

AWS obviously just AWS.

Based on Imply Cloud website it looks like it too is just AWS.

Timescale Cloud gives you freedom to choose your own cloud provider, and lets
you migrate between clouds with a few clicks.

I’m fairly certain we are the first to offer that, but I’m open to any counter
examples.

~~~
SteveBash
Q: Regarding multi-cloud. Say if AWS has an outage will Timescale cloud
fallback to use GCP or Azure?

Can something like this be provided? Not sure if the network latency between
different cloud providers would allow doing a multi-master replication scheme.

~~~
dianasaur323
You select the public cloud vendor you want your machine spun up on. So no, if
AWS has a full outage, it won't fall back to a different cloud. Failover is
done at an availability zone level.

Since TimescaleDB is also open-source, if you want that kind of replication
scheme, you can always install on VMs across clouds. However, as you rightly
pointed out, network latency is a definite concern and impacts the feasibility
of RPO and RTO.

~~~
mfreed
One thing to add:

The Timescale Cloud _does_ allow you to do is create asynchronous read
replicas across different clouds and regions (with a couple clicks).

You can then "fork" a read replica (at any point in time) and make it a
primary to start serving out of that cloud (again, with just a couple clicks).

That's not quite the same as auto-replication/failover between clouds, but
getting pretty far there.

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fnord77
how does this compare to druid/imply.io ?

~~~
dianasaur323
I think the quickest comparison is SQL vs NoSQL. We haven't done performance
benchmarks against Druid yet, but do know of several users who have switched
because they want to use PostgreSQL instead.

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mcallica
Just announced today, here's the blog post:
[https://blog.timescale.com/timescale-cloud-first-fully-
manag...](https://blog.timescale.com/timescale-cloud-first-fully-managed-time-
series-database-service-runs-on-aws-gcp-azure/)

~~~
dang
That gives more background info so we've switched to it from
[https://www.timescale.com/cloud](https://www.timescale.com/cloud). Thanks!

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QuickToBan
Why would I pay to use this open source software? It doesn't make sense to me.

