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Comment by ksajadi | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately we’ve been bitten by influx operation issues a few times before. We adopted influxDB long time ago and always had to deal with breaking changes for each upgrade and every time we had an issue their answer would be: upgrade the latest version and see if it continues.

Then recently they made a change to Telegraf that broke all our data collection because they changed the environment variable replacer and their Jsonnet parser broke.

Now this. Shutting down a region without brownouts and only emails is not operationally acceptable.

We’ve moved on from influxDB for a while and only rely on telegraf now.

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We self host influxdb, never had this problem.

Which problem? Of the massive breaking changes between 0.8 and later, and then between 1.x and 2.x? Not to mention InfluxQL to Flux?

Also, they did remove clustering in the open source version which was a very poor move from a PR perspective. And in my view, they have never recovered from it - years ago it was Prometheus vs InfluxDB for (non-SaaS) observability metrics, nowadays the only question is which backend for Prometheus to choose.

Which Prometheus backend would you recommend?

VictoriaMetrics. Don't have experience with InfluxDB, but had done rudimentary evaluation for popular backend. VictoriaMetrics stood out mainly due to low comparative operational maintenance.

And now they've released 3.0.0 in their cloud, which they claim is backwards compatible, but lets see.

I sometimes wonder if vendors realize that they put their customers into a buying mode when they do this, when our options are:

- Upgrade to the new version of product X.

- Change to vendor or tooling completely as we're already changing everything.

We might pick another system if we feel like it is more stable.

If it's backwards compatible why would they bump the major version?

Either there should have been a breaking change in there or they don't understand symantic versioning

Not sure why the downvotes here, a database service misusing semantic version is itself a red flag in my opinion. If major releases don't indicate a breaking change I'm not as confident in what might be part of a minor or patch release.

To be fair, they have a bunch of associated tooling like their query language and UI, so it might have been those that have merited a bump to 3.x

Yeah that could be, but I think that would still only merit the bump it there was a breaking change in the public API

> they did remove clustering in the open source version which was a very poor move from a PR perspective. And in my view, they have never recovered from it

I still remember this. We were ready to standardize on InfluxDB when we got a taste of their business practices.

Same, we were just about to choose InfluxDB, and ended up using it only for a niche low criticity scenario (VMware vSphere metrics, mostly for troubleshooting). We were never going to purchase Enterprise though, so they haven't lost anything outside of mindshare and champions, which can be evaluated to between 0 and infinity.

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