AWS makes its time series DBMS Timestream generally available

Cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services said on Thursday that its Amazon Timestream, a new time series database management system (DBMS), is now generally available.

A time series database stores high-volume data that’s developing over a period of time. Examples of such data include stock market data points over the years, as well as data from sensors that collect temperature or heartbeats over a period of time.

“For example, manufacturers might want to track IoT (internet of things) sensor data that measure changes in equipment across a facility, online marketers might want to analyze clickstream data that capture how a user navigates a website over time, and data center operators might want to view data that measure changes in infrastructure performance metrics,” AWS said in a statement.

Amazon Timestream, the statement said, manages data for (IoT) and operational applications that can scale to process trillions of time series events per day up to 1,000 times faster than relational databases, and at as low as one-tenth the cost.

AWS customers who use Timestream include New York based insurance company Guardian Life, California based design software and services company Autodesk, and California based infrastructure-as-a-service provider PubNub.

Amazon Timestream saves customers effort and expense by keeping recent data in-memory and moving historical data to a cost-optimized storage tier based upon user-defined policies, the statement said.

The serverless DBMS’ analytics features provide time series-specific functionality to help customers identify trends and patterns in data in near real time.

While there are no upfront costs or commitments required to use Amazon Timestream, customers pay only for the data they write, store, or query, the statement added.

As of Thursday, Amazon Timestream is available in N. Virginia, Ohio, Oregon and Ireland with availability in additional regions in the coming months.

Established in 2006, AWS is a subsidiary of Seattle-based ecommerce giant Amazon. It offers over 175 services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence, IoT, mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 24 geographic regions across the world.