I enjoy trying to guess how cloud services like Amazon Timestream are internally built. I have already bet in the past that DocumentDB was built on top of (Aurora) PostgreSQL (this I also know was possible as I founded https://torodb.com).
My bet for Timestream is that is built on top of DynamoDB. There are many potential indicators (1KB writes, throttling) and some clear ones(pricing follows the exact proportion up to the 4th decimal if you compare across regions, for example), it supports "unlimited" scalability, batching, etc. That reads are eventually consistent may be because they are computed over a GSI. It would be interesting if true as it is cheaper for writes than DynamoDB (on demand, which is the model Timestream has).
Plus there is a reasonable amount of mindshare and possibly market opportunity into offering time series on a serverless database like DynamoDB.
If this were true, it would also mean that Timestream, as hinted in the post, is more performant when accessed more in parallel (as DynamoDB itself is by design a massively parallel multi-tenant infrastructure).
This is a likely option, too. Your observations on pricing are keen.
The one thing that threw me was querying. The limitations felt more Athena-like than PartiQL. And the billing based on scans felt almost like Redshift Spectrum. I mean, S3 is infinitely scalable, right?
Note that DynamoDB's PartiQL support is not an architectural pattern but rather a "simple" translation layer on top of the current three read operations. It doesn't say much to me tbh.
I wouldn't say is impossible to say. Maybe impossible with 100% certainty, obviously, but for me it's quite clear ;)
My bet for Timestream is that is built on top of DynamoDB. There are many potential indicators (1KB writes, throttling) and some clear ones(pricing follows the exact proportion up to the 4th decimal if you compare across regions, for example), it supports "unlimited" scalability, batching, etc. That reads are eventually consistent may be because they are computed over a GSI. It would be interesting if true as it is cheaper for writes than DynamoDB (on demand, which is the model Timestream has).
Plus there is a reasonable amount of mindshare and possibly market opportunity into offering time series on a serverless database like DynamoDB.
If this were true, it would also mean that Timestream, as hinted in the post, is more performant when accessed more in parallel (as DynamoDB itself is by design a massively parallel multi-tenant infrastructure).