InfluxData has released InfluxDB 3 Core and Enterprise editions in a bid to speed and simplify time series data processing.
InfluxDB 3 Core is an open source, high-speed, recent-data engine for real-time applications. According to the pitch, InfluxDB 3 Enterprise adds high availability with auto failover, multi-region durability, read replicas, enhanced security and scalability for production environments. Both products run in a single-node setup, and have a built-in Python processing engine “elevating InfluxDB from passive storage to an active intelligence engine for real-timedata.” The engine brings data transformation, enrichment, and alerting directly into the database.
Founder and CTO Paul Dix claimed:“Time series data never stops, and managing it at scale has always come with trade-offs – performance, complexity, or cost. We rebuilt InfluxDB 3 from the ground up to remove those trade-offs. Core is open source, fast, and deploys in seconds, while Enterprise easily scales for production. Whether you’re running at the edge, in the cloud, or somewhere in between, InfluxDB 3 makes working with time series data faster, easier,and far more efficient than ever.”
A time-series database stores data, such as metrics, IoT and other sensor readings, logs, or financial ticks, indexed by time. It typically features high and continuous ingest rates, compression to reduce the space needed, old data expiration to save space as well, and fast, time-based queries looking at averages and sums over time periods. Examples include InfluxDB, Prometheus, and TimescaleDB.
InfluxData was founded in 2012 to build an open source, distributed time-series data platform. This is InfluxDB, which is used to collect, store, and analyze all time-series data at any scale and in real-time. CEO Evan Kaplan joined in 2016. The company raised around $800,000 in a 2013 seed round followed by a 2014 $8.1 million A-round, a 2016 $16 million B-round, a 2018 $35 million C-round, a 2019 $60 million D-round, and then a 2023 $51 million E-round accompanied by $30 million in debt financing.
Kaplan has maintained a regular cadence of product and partner developments:
- January 2024 – InfluxDB achieved AWS Data and Analytics Competency status in the Data Analytics Platforms and NoSQL/New SQL categories.
- January 2024 – MAN Energy Solutions integrated InfluxDB Cloudas the core of its MAN CEON cloud platform to help achieve fuel reductions in marine and power engines through the use of real-time data.
- March 2024 – AWS announced Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB, a managed offering for AWS customers to run InfluxDB within the AWS console but without the overhead that comes with self-managing InfluxDB.
- September 2024 – New InfluxDB 3.0 productsuite features to simplify time series data management at scale, with performance improvementsfor query concurrency, scaling,and latency. The self-managed InfluxDB Clustered, deployed on Kubernetes, went GA, and featured decoupled, independently scalable ingest and query tiers.
- February 2025 – InfluxData announced Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB Read Replicas to boost query performance, scalability, and reliability for enterprise-scale time series workloads.
The new InfluxDB 3 engine is written in Rust and built with Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Parquet, and Flight. We’re told it delivers “significant performance gains and architectural flexibility compared toprevious open source versions of InfluxDB.” The engine can ingest millions of writes per second and query data in real-time with sub-10 ms lookups.
The Python engine “allows developers to transform, enrich, monitor, and alert on data as it streams in, turning the database into an active intelligence layer that processes data in motion – not just at rest – andin real-time.” This reduces if not eliminates the need for external ETL pipelines.
Both new products fit well with the existing InfluxDB 3 lineup, which is designed for large-scale, distributed workloads in dedicated cloud and Kubernetes environments and has a fully managed, multi-tenant, pay-as-you-go option.
InfluxDB 3 Core is now generally available as a free and open source download. InfluxDB 3 Enterprise is available for production deployments with flexible licensing options. Read more here.
