InfluxDB Cloud is on AWS US East

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We’d like to let you know that InfluxDB Cloud is now on AWS US East, also called us-east-1, based in northern Virginia. This is our third AWS region, after initially launching InfluxDB Cloud in AWS Oregon and later AWS Frankfurt.

This brings InfluxDB Cloud’s effortless scaling, flexible usage-based pricing, AWS marketplace integration, and a broad range of AWS connectivity points to customers that want to manage their time series data in the eastern United States.

aws influxdata

Where InfluxDB Cloud runs

Where does InfluxDB run now? Below is a list of all the locations as of when this post was written, but here is the current list of InfluxDB Cloud Regions.

Vendor
Region Name
Location
AWS us-east-1 Virginia, United States
AWS us-west-2 Oregon, United States
AWS eu-central-1 Frankfurt, Germany
Microsoft Azure East US Virginia, United States
Microsoft Azure West Europe Amsterdam, Netherlands
Google Cloud us-central-1 Iowa, United States

As you can see, InfluxDB Cloud is broadly distributed across North America and Europe:

InfluxDB Cloud reqions major cloud providers<figcaption> InfluxDB Cloud is available in multiple regions across all three major cloud providers.</figcaption>

Integrate InfluxDB Cloud with AWS

InfluxDB Cloud has a broad range of integration points with AWS. Before we dive in, it’s helpful to think of our time series data platform as doing three main things:

  1. Accumulating time series data by ingesting it from numerous locations
  2. Analyzing that data, for visualization, anomaly detection and alerting
  3. Acting on that data, by sending to alerting systems, custom applications or third-party tools

With this framework, there are a number of ways in which InfluxDB integrates with AWS; AWS technologies are marked with an AWS logo, InfluxDB technologies are in purple, and other technologies are in gray.

InfluxDB has a wide range of integration points with AWS<figcaption> InfluxDB has a wide range of integration points with AWS.</figcaption>

To accumulate time series data, InfluxDB provides a number of options for data ingest, but I’d like to focus on two: Telegraf and Flux. Telegraf, our open source server agent for collecting metrics, can pull data from the following AWS services:

Using Flux, our data scripting language purpose-built for time series data, you can pull data directly from SQL data stores, such as AWS RDS Postgres, RDS MySQL, RDS MariaDB, RDS SQL Server, and AWS Athena. The specific Flux function to do this is called sql.from(), and is part of the Flux SQL package. This function lets you enrich time series data to provide additional context. Here are a few examples:

  • For IoT users, Flux lets you combine time series data from sensors with information from relational tables like manufacturer, model number, device age or mileage.
  • For real user monitoring (RUM), you can use Flux to look up customer IDs and connect customer name, pricing plan, and firmographics like company name and location.
  • In IT infrastructure monitoring, Flux can resolve server IDs to software version and configuration parameters.

In fact, Flux lets you enrich from much more than just RDS — from just about any relational database:

InfluxDB 2.0 has relational database integrations<figcaption> InfluxDB and Flux let you enrich time series data using relational databases</figcaption>

In addition to Telegraf and Flux, InfluxDB Cloud can also ingest data from Vector, Apache NiFi, OpenHAB, JMeter, Node-RED, and Jaeger. All in all, a broad range of options for data ingest, for making observability reality.

The analyze piece of the equation is handled by InfluxDB itself. Our main vehicle for this is Flux. Beyond data enrichment, Flux provides a broad range of functions for statistical analysis and forecasting, such as:

To act on time series data, you can use Flux running in InfluxDB Tasks to send alerts to a broad range of endpoints: Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) and other email services such as Twilio SendGrid, Mailjet, and Mailgun; IT alerting systems such as PagerDuty, Atlassian Opsgenie, Sensu, and soon ServiceNow and BigPanda; messaging services such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Discord, Telegram; and general-purpose solutions such as Pushbullet, MQTT, and webhooks.

Build custom alerting with InfluxDB 2.0<figcaption> InfluxDB and Flux let you send alerts to a broad range of endpoints.</figcaption>

You can also use Flux to pull data into your code running on AWS Lambda, EC2, or other services, using our client libraries for JavaScript/Node.js, Python, Go, Arduino, Java, Scala, C#, Ruby, PHP, and Kotlin. These client libraries were previously provided by our open source community; they are now fully maintained and supported by InfluxData.

 InfluxDB has ten fully maintained client libraries<figcaption> InfluxDB has ten fully maintained client libraries</figcaption>

How to access InfluxDB Cloud on AWS Virginia

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to get InfluxDB Cloud on AWS us-east-1:

First, visit cloud2.influxdata.com and sign up for a free InfluxDB Cloud account.

how to create a free influxdb cloud account

Once you hit the Create Account button, check your email for a message that looks like this:

influxdb cloud signup verify email

Click Verify Your Email, and you’ll see the following page asking you where to store your data.

influxdb cloud provider

Once you select AWS, choose US East (N. Virginia), and you’ll use that instance of InfluxDB Cloud.

influxdb cloud provider region

There are a few more steps that are self-explanatory, but one thing I want to point out is the InfluxDB Cloud URL for AWS East US:

https://us-east-1-1.aws.cloud2.influxdata.com 

This is the endpoint of the InfluxDB Cloud API that you’ll be using when you interact with the InfluxDB API, InfluxDB client libraries, Influx CLI, and Telegraf. Here is our documentation page with a complete list of InfluxDB Cloud URLs if you are running on a different region.

Customized code snippets for AWS US East

Speaking of our documentation, here’s a handy trick to customize all our code samples to use the AWS US East URL. In the InfluxDB Cloud documentation, click on the gear icon in the upper-right corner:

influxdb cloud gear icon

Then specify that you’re running in AWS US East (Virginia):

select influxdb cloud region

And now code samples in our documentation, such as on this page, will have the correct InfluxDB Cloud URL already inserted so you have one less step to worry about. See the first line of the curl command below:

curl command

Expanding our reach

Even though InfluxDB Cloud is available on six regions, we’re still looking to expand our footprint to best serve you. However, we can’t simply deploy across the combined ~75 regions offered by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

The reason: InfluxDB Cloud is available as an instant-on, always available cloud service; you don’t spin up and maintain a single-tenant virtual machine. This means that for each region, we’re always running a fleet of InfluxDB instances, ready to accept your incoming data, run your queries and tasks, display your dashboards, and fire off your alerts. And THAT means each region incurs a significant monthly cloud bill that needs to be offset by revenue — just like any business.

So, we need YOUR help in telling us where to expand next by filling in this form. It’s literally five fields, anonymous, and will take you all of 30 seconds to complete:

influxdb cloud region expansion form

 

AWS US East is just part of the story

Expanding into AWS US East is just one of the many recent improvements to InfluxDB Cloud. In this video from the InfluxDays North America 2020 Virtual Experience, our VP of Engineering, Ryan Betts, goes into more detail about all we’ve done recently and some of our roadmap:

Conclusion

Here’s more about our partnership with AWS. If you’d like to check out InfluxDB Cloud for yourself, sign up for a free InfluxDB Cloud account. Once you do, feel free to ask any questions in our ever-helpful InfluxDB community and community Slack channel. Enjoy!