Refining a Mature Cloud Platform: Cloud Week at Timescale

Mike Freedman -

When we first launched TimescaleDB seven years ago, our message was straightforward:  “Something as old as PostgreSQL can seem boring. But sometimes boring is awesome, especially when it’s your database. TimescaleDB is designed to just work, not wake you up at 3 a.m.”

Timescale scales PostgreSQL’s performance for demanding applications. Tens of thousands of businesses power their products with TimescaleDB and build real-time in-app dashboards and analytics on top of their sensor data, application data, financial data, and more.

Timescale allows developers to stay with PostgreSQL even as their workloads scale, rather than risking a replatforming to a more unconventional and unfamiliar database engine. 

But many of today’s developers are not just looking for great database software but a fully managed, mature cloud database platform. Cloud databases that are easy to start, easy to use, and easy to scale, even while offering the performance, reliability, availability, security, operational control, and cost-effectiveness that businesses need, whether a new startup or a large enterprise. And that intangible awesomeness of running smoothly each and every 3 a.m. throughout the year.

That’s how our cloud has evolved since we started building it in 2019. A mature cloud platform that is both innovative and dependable and one worthy of the trust that our users place in us every day to power their core businesses. Ready for the builders. Ready for the enterprise.

Guess what? It’s Cloud Week here at Timescale.

Built for Production

But before we introduce any of our new features, here is a quick summary of a number of benefits that Timescale’s mature cloud platform offers for organizations looking to run their PostgreSQL workloads in the cloud. It’s been a multi-year journey to get here, but the team is proud of its robust capabilities today:

Best-in-class performance: Timescale is Postgres, but faster. It’s built on the foundation of 100 % open-source PostgreSQL but adds new capabilities through our embedded TimescaleDB database extension that yields lower query latency and higher throughput. And a cloud purpose-built with TimescaleDB and performance in mind. But just see the open-source benchmarks, with 3.3x to over 300x faster queries than Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.

Scalability made easy: With Timescale, you can easily scale your databases in multiple dimensions, as compute and storage scale independently. Compute scales either vertically (to large compute sizes) or horizontally (by adding read replicas), and Timescale’s storage automatically grows or shrinks with your usage, from 10 GB to hundreds of TBs of data. This flexibility allows your database to easily adapt to changing workloads.

High availability and reliability: Timescale provides automated backup and recovery through continuous incremental backup, regular database and disk snapshots, and point-in-time recovery and branching. It offers multi-AZ (availability zone) deployments for high availability, reducing the risk of downtime, and rapid recovery for all services by fast database restart and remote disk remount given its disaggregated architecture. Further, it employs unique memory guard protections to avoid PostgreSQL out-of-memory crashes and decouples its control and data planes for greater resilience with availability guarantees backed by commercial service level agreements (SLAs).

Automated upgrades and software patching: Timescale takes care of applying database updates and security patches, reducing the risk of security vulnerabilities and ensuring that your database is up-to-date. TimescaleDB and minor PostgreSQL upgrades are applied with zero downtime during configurable maintenance windows, and PostgreSQL major version upgrades use a forking workflow and disk snapshots to minimize downtime and risk. By reducing operational overhead, your developers and ops team can focus on more strategic and value-added activities.

Robust security and compliance: Timescale treats security seriously, from formal compliance (SOC 2 Type 2 and GDPR) to platform features. Data encryption at rest (both disk and backups) and in transit, database role-based access control, platform SSO/SAML and multi-factor authentication, and secure networking, including VPC peering. Timescale employs layered database “escalation” protections, secure SDLC practices, automated vulnerability scanning and code analysis, third-party pen-testing, and other measures to protect your data and ensure compliance with industry regulations.

Deep observability: Timescale provides deep operational visibility into your databases, both to help understand performance, uncover regressions, and optimize performance. This isn’t just your standard in-database statement logs, but deep system-level capture and correlation at unprecedented scale and fidelity. Further, metrics and logs can be continuously exported to AWS CloudWatch or Datadog for single-pane monitoring and alerting.

Transparent, cost-effective pricing: Timescale offers simple, easy-to-understand consumption-based pricing based on compute and storage, with no hidden fees like data transfer costs, data read/scan costs, or others. Timescale is cost-effective compared to both managed databases like AWS RDS for PostgreSQL, and even self-managed PostgreSQL or TimescaleDB deployments. Cost savings emerge from both core database technologies (columnar compression, tiered storage, resource efficiency), usage-based storage pricing that avoids wasteful disk allocation, and built-in operational features that reduce the need for dedicated database administrators.

Top-notch support and services: Timescale employs an amazing team of PostgreSQL experts, staffed in a 24x7 follow-the-sun model across APAC, EMEA, and NASA, who provide full consultative support, including Production Support with Severity-1 responsiveness. Architectural reviews, data modeling and query optimization assistance, feature testing, and migration support all ensure customer success, with Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores regularly above 98 %.

Global reach: Finally, you can deploy Timescale in many AWS regions worldwide, enabling you to reach a global audience while ensuring low-latency, secure access to your data.  

What’s New in Cloud Week?

Today kicked off the first of three consecutive launch weeks here at Timescale, announcing a myriad of capabilities—both big and small—we’ve been developing and maturing over the past months (and, in a few cases, years).

The first one, Cloud Week, focused particularly on the needs of production users and businesses. This week’s launches included:

So sit back, pop open your browser console and a handy psql shell, and enjoy some new capabilities from Timescale.

If you’re still not using Timescale, you can create your first service in just two minutes. And if you’d like personalized advice for your use case, reach out to us. We’d love to hear from you!