As disclosure, I’m part of a company that is using also Influx, and I like it very much for the power it brings.
I am curious about one topic, and that being the lack of release notes for InfluxDB Cloud.
Specifically, I see Influx is treating IDB Cloud as a separate product, which makes sense, but in the documentation section it has no version selector. While this makes sense compared to the approach used by others in the market, I can not stop asking myself about what actual version of InfluxDB is used on the cloud side, but more specifically, how “old” or “new” is the Influx DB Cloud version used in cloud compared to OSS or Enterprise. One example I expose here is the changelog for OSS2.1: you see there are new parameters for the /users API, and other API related stuff. For the InfluxDB cloud however all the cloud updates don’t necessarily list the same API changes. Maybe the question that would answer this very fast is: are all InfluxDB customers automatically getting access to the latest upgrades listed on the InfluxDB Cloud without making any change? In this situation it would be pretty clear and I can understand the lack of a version selector.
And how are the differences between OSS/Enterprise going to be going forward: is Cloud going to be prioritized less or more, will there be big differences in capabilities between them (not speaking only about throughput and performance, but also about available APIs)?
Hi @Katakana54,
I hope you are doing well 
So you can find the release notes for InfluxDB cloud here: Release notes | InfluxDB Cloud Documentation (it looks a little behind so i will ask internally about that)
With regards to your other questions:
- All cloud customers immediately gain access to new features on all release. We promote a continuous development cycle of InfluxDB cloud so there isn’t exactly a version to link Cloud iterations to. We alert users to new features. Breaking changes are hard to come by but we always make these notifications a priority when they come.
- InfluxDB OSS due to its release cycle is always a little behind the cloud. On the next release of OSS, we normally add most features which were introduced into the cloud to OSS.
- OSS and Enterprise remain a priority but the rule of thumb most new features hit the cloud first. Enterprise changes mostly occur on a customer priority basis.
Hope this helps
@Jay_Clifford thank you for the insight, I think it’s interesting to see.
I am a bit surprised from a technology standpoint that Cloud is a bit ahead of the on-premise offerings, but I guess it’s just a matter of priorities.
I imagined there is a far lower threshold of “fear to add new features” in the on-premise versions (you could design something breaking, new and cool add it to 2.2. with no fear to break something in production due to the fact that customers can decide when to install it).
Following this mindset, I have a feeling that Cloud innovation is a little slower due to the fact you always must keep compatibility with existing users applications. Of course, this is not substantiated by anything else than my reasoning above.
Hey @Katakana54,
So a lot of the time we find the inverse to be true. We still maintain development and staging environments before any feature reaches production. It also allows us to more easily test our big-ticket items like Iox. This has been a huge undertaking to develop and use the cloud as our initial deployment method allows us to test iterations against real-use cases with chosen customers. It also means if something breaks we can push a fix relatively quickly and easily without worrying about bundling a new release of on-prem for them to install and test. This means when a lot of cloud features hit OSS they have been tried and tested with many of the bugs already ironed out. I completely understand your point, however. OSS will play a much bigger role at the edge for us. As we expand our capabilities as a hybrid platform. For example in 2.2 you would see we released edge to cloud replication for OSS
Fascinating, and thank you for your detailed explanation, I appreciate it!
Anytime!! great to have these conversations and this is only my opinion. Everything can be set to change depending on user feedback
