The InfluxDB is a time series database from InfluxData headquartered in San Francisco. As an observability solution, it is designed to provide real-time visibility into stacks, sensors and systems. It is available open source, via the Cloud as a DBaaS option, or through an Enterprise subscription.
InfluxDB is very good at storing monitoring metrics (e.g. performance data). InfluxDB is not the right choice if you need to store other data types (like plain text, data relations etc.).
If you have a cluster of nodes with MariaDB MaxScale and you want all the nodes of the cluster to have a similar load and not to be be penalized for queries or writes to the database, you can mount the MaxScale product in front of the MariaDB cluster. MaxScale will balance the requests based on what is being sent to each node to have an equitable load and will cache the queries that it sends to each one. This optimizes the response time to database queries and spreads the load out among all nodes in a similar way.
InfluxDB is a near perfect product for time series database engines. The relatively small list of cons are heavily outweighed by it's ability to just work and be a very flexible and powerful database engine. The community and support provided by the corporation are the only areas I have little experience.
MariaDB MaxScale is a powerful tool and easy to use. It has helped us a lot to improve the performance of our database queries. It implements a security layer that acts as a firewall for the databases, masks the data, or limits the results of the queries. It also integrates easily with Kafka.
We have worked with the InfluxDB support team a few times so far and it has been positive. Issues submitted are worked on promptly and we have good feedback.
We have launched several inquiries to MariaDB MaxScale support, and they have always responded very quickly. They also want to hold frequent meetings with the client to get their opinion understand how they can help. I see a very human support that is concerned about the customer.
To be honest, I didn't look at alternatives since InfluxDB performs very well if you can oversee the lack of security and HA features. But for all challenges, there is an easy solution which brings you forward (e.g. read load balancing can be achieved by using a common HTTPS load balancer).
ProxySLQ allows many simultaneous connections and allows the cache of queries in memory but it does not have high availability or scalability natively, only through external tools. HAProxy is not able to perform load balancing in an optimal way.
Instead, MariaDB MaxScale allows high availability, scalability, and data replication to external systems such as Kafka. In addition, MaxScale has a monitor that allows you to see the status of the set of databases.