InfluxDB 2.0 Client Libraries by Noah Crowley

Noah Crowley / Developer Advocate
InfluxDB 2.0 Client
Libraries

© 2018 InfluxData. All rights reserved.
A new approach for Clients in InfluxDB 2.0
• In 1.x, the client libraries were community-led efforts

• A function of available resources — not enough engineers!

• Has been a successful effort; supports 17 languages

• Some issues with consistency across libraries

• Function names, batching and buffering of data

• In 2.0, the client libraries are part of the work we’re doing on the
platform as a whole

An API-driven approach
• 2.0 has a consistent and easy to use API across all products

• Open Source, Enterprise, Cloud

• Allows for easy migration of workloads

• Want to give developers an equally consistent and easy to use set
of client libraries

• Consistency of function names (with respect to language
idioms)

• Ease of use: Documentation & examples, always up-to-date

Defining the API: Swagger
• The InfluxDB repo contains an API specification

• Industry-standard format

• Information about endpoints, parameters, security, etc.

• Single source of truth

• Allows the specification to be checked into Git and
versioned alongside the code

• Provides a contract for engineers to follow when developing
against the API

/telegrafs:
get:
tags:
- Telegrafs
parameters:
- $ref: '#/components/parameters/
TraceSpan'
- in: query
name: orgID
description: specifies the organization
of the resource
required: true
schema:
type: string
responses:
'200':
description: a list of telegraf configs
content:
application/json:
schema:
$ref: "#/components/schemas/Telegrafs"
default:
description: unexpected error
content:
application/json:
schema:
$ref: “#/components/schemas/Error"

Developing against the API: Swagger Codegen
• Swagger also gives us the ability to do code generation

• Both client and server are possible

• Tradeoffs between codegen and writing libraries by hand

• Ideally the libraries would be fully autogenerated, minimizing
the amount of work that needs to be done

• Tightly couples the code to the spec, making it difficult to
diverge

• At the very least, can give developers a starting point

• Downsides:

• Beholden to the quality of the code produced by the generator

• Performance & User Experience

• Time spent learning tooling

• Wasn’t something we were interested in for the server

• Codegen for the client libraries:

• For some languages, this is a viable option

• For others, the generated code is better used as a starting
point

Consistent Guidelines for API Libraries
• As we work through the Alpha and move into the Beta, we’re
continuing to refine our guidelines for writing API libraries

• Care about the user experience: function names, etc.

• Factors outside of the Swagger definition:

• How we batch and write points, and deal with backpressure

• Consistency guarantees for read & write

• Dealing with large/streaming queries

• Codegen is recommended, but likely won’t be required

What does the API give us?
• Two types of endpoints in the API

• Traditional CRUD endpoints for managing resources

• Everything in 2.0 can be managed through the API

• Dashboards, Telegraf configs, users & permissions, etc.

• Two GRPC endpoints for write and query

• Allows us to interact with InfluxDB 2.0 in a purely programmatic
fashion, if we want

Building against the API
• For 1.x, the client libraries have been used for:

• Application instrumentation & performance monitoring

• Support for managing InfluxDB using configuration-as-code
tools such as Terraform and Ansible

• Customer-facing applications that use Time Series Data

• Data analysis tools

• Custom Dashboards

• ETL & Reporting tooling

Building against the API
• Expect to see similar efforts with 2.0

• Building libraries in-house allows the community to focus on
building on top of Influx

Building against the API - New Abstractions
• New features in the API allow for new types of applications

• “Documents” is a simple key-value store that is currently being
used for templating within the UI

• Wanted to abstract the Chronograf-specific APIs of 1.x

• Allow developers to write additional data directly to the
database without using another tool

• Can be used for storing metadata for an IoT application,
dashboard customizations, etc.

Key Libraries
• Critical Path: Used by our team to build 2.0

• Go: CLI, Telegraf

• JavaScript: UI

• Being built by the core engineering org, developed as we go

• Some divergence; Go library needs to be made consistent

• Changing as the API and requirements evolve

JavaScript/TypeScript
• Initial version exists at github.com/influxdata/influxdb2-js

• Team decided to make use of autogenerated code

• Which generator?

• Swagger Codegen

• Official, being re-written for OAS 3.0

• Openapi-codegen

• Fork of the OAS 2.0 codegen, support for more
languages, built by Swagger Codegen developers

openapi-codegen
• You can use a Docker container to run the codegen tool:
docker run --rm -v ${PWD}:/local openapitools/openapi-generator-cli generate
-i https://raw.githubusercontent.com/influxdata/platform/master/http/cur_swagger.yml
-g go
-o /local/out/go

JVM
• Library for Java, Reactive, Scala, Kotlin

• Built by Bonitoo

• Currently lives at github.com/bonitoo-io/influxdb-client-java

• Hosted in Bonitoo Maven snapshot repo

• Still evolving, ready to be demoed!

• Vaadin Flow demo:

• github.com/rhajek/influx-demo

InfluxDB 2.0 Client Libraries by Noah Crowley

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