Hello everyone,
So I’ve been trying to learn all about influx and grafana for the last couple of weeks. But all the videos I’ve been watching always start with installing influx or grafana on a managed server and influxQL is being used to query in the videos.
so I’m really wondering why all these people are using managed versions of these two services? I thought ‘flux’ is the new way to query. what am I missing? is there any advantages to using managed instead of cloud?
I wouldn’t say no one uses them, the cloud versions just haven’t been around that long.
It could be that the videos are perhaps older, because InfluxDB 2.x and the flux language have not been around that long either. There are still many videos showing InfluxDB 1.x and InfluxQL.
Many of the videos are from Homelab tinkerers, who of course enjoy hosting this on their Raspberry or Homeserver themselves. Or there was simply no cloud version yet. In addition, with the self-hosted OSS version you can avoid some restrictions, e.g. regarding retention or number of buckets, which you would have in the cloud version (in the free tier).
As I said, has not been around that long.
You don’t have any restrictions and the data actually resides with me instead of on an AWS/GCP/Azure server. But you also have to take care of everything yourself… hardware, power, installation, updates, backup, security… 
