How to run InfluxDB Cloud on Azure, AWS and Google

7 min readNov 16, 2020

With InfluxDB Cloud generally available on Microsoft Azure, you have the freedom to run the leading time series database on whichever you prefer: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or AWS.

If you’re a Microsoft Azure customer, InfluxDB Cloud provides you with:

Effortless scaling to handle the largest time series data workloads;
Flexible usage-based pricing that frees you from worrying about over- or under-provisioning database instances; and
The ability to ingest time series data from a broad range of Azure services.

Because InfluxDB Cloud is now multi-cloud, you can:

Choose the cloud provider that best meets your needs around cloud services, developer tooling, budget and data compliance;
Run production time series data workloads on the same cloud vendor that hosts the rest of your application infrastructure, reducing latency and data ingest costs; and
Increase your flexibility to shift workloads across cloud vendors if needed.

Where does InfluxDB Cloud run?

InfluxDB Cloud now runs in five regions across three vendors and two continents. For Azure, this region is Azure West Europe, in Amsterdam. This will soon expand to six, as we expand to the Azure East U.S. region in Blue Ridge, Virginia, in early September.

Here’s a complete list of locations where InfluxDB Cloud is available:

Here’s a map of where InfluxDB Cloud runs:

How does InfluxDB Cloud integrate with Microsoft Azure?

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

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

To accumulate time series data, InfluxDB provides a number of options, 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 Microsoft technologies:

Azure IoT Hub, using the Telegraf plugins for Azure Event Hub, AMQP, MQTT, and HTTPS, to collect IoT device telemetry data.
Windows servers, using the Telegraf Windows Performance Counter plugin and Windows Services plugin, to ensure that your Windows servers are performant.
GitHub, using the Telegraf plugin and InfluxDB Template for GitHub, to track stats for each of your repositories, such as the number of forks, open issues, etc.
Azure Storage Queues, using the eponymous Telegraf plugin, to track queue sizes.
SQL Server, using the Telegraf plugin and InfluxDB Template for SQL Server, to track the health and performance of your databases.

Also, Telegraf has over 200 plugins, covering technologies that aren’t Microsoft-specific but which you might find on Azure, such as Docker and Kubernetes. You can also pull in data from over 700 FluentD plugins, thanks to the Telegraf FluentD plugin.

As if that’s not enough, our Flux data scripting and query language has a SQL library that lets you enrich your time series telemetry with metadata from relational databases, including SQL Server. This metadata can include IoT asset information — for example, the year, make, and model of a piece of IoT equipment. The specific Flux function you use to do this is called sql.from().

In addition to Telegraf and Flux, InfluxDB Cloud can also ingest data from Vector, Apache NiFi, OpenHAB, and JMeter. All in all, a broad range of options.

The analyze piece of the equation is handled by InfluxDB itself. As mentioned, InfluxDB Cloud runs on Azure infrastructure running in the West EU region in Amsterdam, and by early September, East US in Virginia.

Additionally, when you analyze your data using Flux from within the InfluxDB UI, you do so in an embedded Monaco editor that delivers an experience that is similar to Microsoft Visual Studio Code with capabilities like autocompletion, syntax validation and highlighting, variable references and renaming, and more. There’s also a Flux plugin for VS Code, for developers building applications on top of InfluxDB. If you have features you’d like us to add, file an issue on the Flux LSP repo.

These editors are two of many ways we sweat the details to ensure that you have a great experience working with InfluxDB, and is part of our time to awesome mantra.

Flux provides a broad range of functions for statistical analysis and forecasting, such as:

Calculating percentiles to detect SLA compliance failures
Windowing and aggregating data to pick out insights from noisy data sets
Enriching monitoring data with business data in SQL databases — like account name, type or size — to detect anomalies by business measures
Forecasting with Holt-Winters to predict outages and capacity issues
Geographically tracking monitoring metrics to better determine which regions are experiencing problems
Sophisticated anomaly detection, using techniques like Median Absolute Deviation (MAD) and Balanced Iterative Reducing & Clustering (BIRCH), to help you find and fix problems faster and reduce your mean time to resolution (MTTR)

To act on time series data, you can

Send alerts to Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, Slack, Discord, Telegram, Pushbullet, and via webhooks.
Pull data into your custom applications using our client libraries for Javascript/Node.js, C#, and more.

The diagram below sums up these points of integration. Purple boxes are technologies provided by InfluxDB, blue boxes are provided by Microsoft, and grey boxes are third party technologies such as Grafana or PagerDuty.

InfluxDB Cloud on Azure pricing

InfluxDB Cloud pricing has three tiers:

Free, for hobbyists or those experimenting to see what technologies work best for their project
Usage-based pricing, which charges your credit card each month according to how much data you write, store and query
Annual plans, where you commit to a preset level of consumption in exchange for discounts beyond our usage-based pricing

To learn more, visit our InfluxDB Cloud pricing page. To go deeper on the costs of InfluxDB Cloud on Azure, check out this blog post, which covers the product’s total cost of ownership, as well as how to manage your data ingest and egress costs.

This pricing is the same whether you run InfluxDB Cloud on Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud. Regardless of where you run InfluxDB Cloud, you have access to all the benefits of its serverless cloud database architecture. Let’s explain.

What is a serverless database?

Unlike some “cloud” databases that are little more than fixed-sized virtual machines, databases with a fully elastic serverless architecture free you from having to worry about over- or under-provisioning your databases, and ensure that you only pay for what you use. This eliminates time-consuming migrations from one VM to another, or paying for unused capacity. After all, the cloud is supposed to be about productivity, not busywork.

InfluxDB Cloud applies serverless thinking to time series data. As you ingest, analyze, and visualize on ever-increasing amounts of data from sensors, software, and customer metrics, it automatically scales without any effort on your part.

How do we achieve this scalability?

First, InfluxDB, our open source database, is purpose-built for time series telemetry and thus has high single-node scalability of hundreds of thousands of writes per second.
Also, InfluxDB Cloud runs InfluxDB instances across multiple Kubernetes clusters that elastically scale in or out as needed, as well as provide redundancy for high reliability.
Finally, InfluxData’s site reliability engineering team manages InfluxDB Cloud 24/7 — so you don’t have to.

All this means you don’t pay for a fixed-sized VM, but instead pay only for what you use — how much data you ingest and store, and how much you query.

Get started with InfluxDB Cloud on Azure

Go to cloud2.influxdata.com to get started. You’ll see a screen like this:

Later in the registration process, you’ll be prompted to pick where to host your data. Once you pick Azure, you’ll instantly get access to InfluxDB Cloud. There’s no database-on-a-VM that you need to wait to start up. Because InfluxDB Cloud is a multi-tenant service, you can immediately get to work; it’s instant-on.

Then follow the steps in our Getting Started and Collecting Data guides. One hidden gem is this video which shows how easy it is to add data to InfluxDB Cloud using Telegraf:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFS2zANwIrc&feature=emb_logo

When capturing data with Telegraf, client libraries, or other means, you’ll want to ensure that you use the correct URL for InfluxDB Cloud on Azure:

https://westeurope-1.azure.cloud2.influxdata.com

If you’re looking to run InfluxDB Cloud with another region or provider, you can find all our cloud URLs here.

Here’s another trick to ensure you always use the correct URL for InfluxDB Cloud: click the gear icon in the upper right corner of our InfluxDB Cloud 2 documentation: