Install self-hosted TimescaleDB from a pre-built cloud image

Deploying TimescaleDB to AWS?

Timescale Cloud is the most effective way to use TimescaleDB in AWS, as it saves you the time to manually configure your services, backups, high availability, data recovery, forks, upgrades, and more. You can also connect to Timescale Cloud through your own private infrastructure via VPC peering.

Try for free

You can install a self-hosted TimescaleDB instance on a cloud hosting provider, from a pre-built, publicly available machine image. These instructions show you how to use a pre-built Amazon machine image (AMI), on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The currently available pre-built cloud image is:

  • Ubuntu 20.04 Amazon EBS-backed AMI

The Timescale AMI uses Elastic Block Store (EBS) attached volumes. This allows you to store image snapshots, dynamic IOPS configuration, and provides some protection of your data if the EC2 instance goes down. Choose an EC2 instance type that is optimized for EBS attached volumes. For information on choosing the right EBS optimized EC2 instance type, see the AWS instance configuration documentation.

note

This section shows how to use the AMI from within the AWS EC2 dashboard. However, you can also use the AMI to build an instance using tools like Cloudformation, Terraform, the AWS CLI, or any other AWS deployment tool that supports public AMIs.

Installing self-hosted TimescaleDB from a pre-build cloud image

  1. Make sure you have an Amazon Web Services account, and are signed in to your EC2 dashboard.
  2. Navigate to Images → AMIs.
  3. In the search bar, change the search to Public images and type Timescale search term to find all available Timescale images.

  4. Select the image you want to use, and click Launch instance from image.

    Launch an AMI in AWS EC2

After you have completed the installation, connect to your instance and configure your database. For information about connecting to the instance, see the AWS accessing instance documentation. The easiest way to configure your datase is to run the timescaledb-tune script, which is included with the timescaledb-tools package. For more information, see the configuration section.

note

After running the timescaledb-tune script, you need to restart the PostgreSQL service for the configuration changes to take effect. To restart the service, run sudo systemctl restart postgresql.service.

Set up the TimescaleDB extension

When you have PostgreSQL and TimescaleDB installed, connect to your instance and set up the TimescaleDB extension.

Setting up the TimescaleDB extension

  1. On your instance, at the command prompt, connect to the PostgreSQL instance as the postgres superuser:

    1. sudo -u postgres psql

  2. At the prompt, create an empty database. For example, to create a database called tsdb:

    1. CREATE database tsdb;

  3. Connect to the database you created:

    1. \c tsdb

  4. Add the TimescaleDB extension:

    1. CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS timescaledb;

You can check that the TimescaleDB extension is installed by using the \dx command at the command prompt. It looks like this:

  2. tsdb=# \dx
  4.                                       List of installed extensions
  6.     Name     | Version |   Schema   |                            Description
  8. -------------+---------+------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------
  10.  plpgsql     | 1.0     | pg_catalog | PL/pgSQL procedural language
  12.  timescaledb | 2.1.1   | public     | Enables scalable inserts and complex queries for time-series data
  14. (2 rows)
  16. (END)

Where to next

Now that you have your first TimescaleDB database up and running, you can check out the TimescaleDB section in our documentation, and find out what you can do with it.

If you want to work through some tutorials to help you get up and running with TimescaleDB and time-series data, check out our tutorials section.

You can always contact us if you need help working something out, or if you want to have a chat.