Installing from an Amazon AMI (Ubuntu)

TimescaleDB is currently available as an Ubuntu 18.04 Amazon EBS-backed AMI. AMIs are distributed by region, and our AMI is currently available in US and EU regions. Note that this image is built to use an EBS attached volume rather than the default disk that comes with EC2 instances.

See below for the image id corresponding to each region for the most recent TimescaleDB version:

To launch the AMI, go to the AMIs section of your AWS EC2 Dashboard run the following steps:

• Select Public Images under the dropdown menu.
• Filter the image id by the image id for your region and select the image.
• Click the Launch button.

You can also use the image id to build an instance using Cloudformation, Terraform, the AWS CLI, or any other AWS deployment tool that supports building from public AMIs.

TimescaleDB is installed on the AMI, but you will still need to follow the steps for initializing a database with the TimescaleDB extension. See our setup section for details. Depending on your user/permission needs, you will also need to set up a postgres superuser for your database by following these postgres instructions. Another possibility is using the operating system’s ubuntu user and modifying the pg_hba.

warning

AMIs do not know what instance type you are using beforehand. Therefore the PostgreSQL configuration (postgresql.conf) that comes with our AMI uses the default settings, which are not optimal for most systems. Our AMI is packaged with timescaledb-tune, which you can use to tune postgresql.conf based on the underlying system resources of your instance. See our configuration section for details.

tip

These AMIs are made for EBS attached volumes. This allows for snapshots, protection of data if the EC2 instance goes down, and dynamic IOPS configuration. You should 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 page.