E98: Creating the Time Series Data Category with InfluxData

Development

Paul Dix, co-founder and CTO of InfluxData, shares the early challenges faced in developing InfluxDB, the first open-source time series database company. Initially, the focus was on creating a metrics database, but over time, the team realized the importance of investing in the core database technology, leading to the development of InfluxDB IOX, built on open-source standards like Apache Arrow and Parquet 1. Paul reflects on the origins of InfluxData, which began as a solution for managing time series data at scale in the finance sector, eventually evolving into a SaaS application for real-time metrics and monitoring 2.

The solution that we had built was essentially this custom bit of scala application code on top of cassandra as the long term data storage layer and redis as kind of like a real time indexing layer.

--- Paul Dix

This journey highlights the strategic shifts and technological advancements that shaped InfluxDB's development.

   

Adoption

InfluxData's adoption strategy involved both organic growth and strategic marketing efforts. Paul Dix was not surprised by the diverse use cases for time series data, as he had prior experience in applying these concepts to financial and server monitoring data 3. The company actively promoted the versatility of time series databases beyond metrics, emphasizing their applicability in IoT and sales forecasting. Early traction was gained through meetups and conferences, with a pivotal moment occurring when a documentation website was shared on Hacker News, leading to widespread attention 4.

Somebody grabbed that posted to Hacker News, and it got to the front page of Hacker News and it was there all day and people were talking about it.

--- Paul Dix

These efforts helped establish InfluxDB as a leading player in the time series database space.