My larger point is that, in contrast with the new project, InfluxDB currently has ~400 contributors. I'm certain that many dozens of those were involved in getting the current storage engine to a stable place. And now that hard work is on a path to being deprecated by moving to a completely new language and set of underlying technologies.
Taking the project from a handful of contributors to a production-ready technology within an existing ecosystem is a non-trivial task. I'm sure it will come together eventually, but the commitment to ship it "early next year" seems unlikely to me.
I agree, they appear to be playing catch up on many fronts. Notably, with Cortex, Tempo, and Loki, Grafana Labs seem to have pulled way ahead in advancing a successful open-source cloud observability strategy.
InfluxData have a long history of writing (and rewriting) their own storage engines, so choosing to do it again is unsurprising. I guess this sort of hints that the current TSM/TSI have probably reached their performance and scalability limits and will be EOL before too long.
What I find interesting is that this project is already almost a year old and only has six contributors (two of whom look like external contractors). It seems more like a fun side project than the future core of the database that is supposed to be deployed into production next year.
Furthermore, hundreds of people have been responsible for its development over the years: https://www.postgresql.org/community/contributors/
As an additional, possibly more relevant example - the Cortex project has 158 contributors: https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex
My larger point is that, in contrast with the new project, InfluxDB currently has ~400 contributors. I'm certain that many dozens of those were involved in getting the current storage engine to a stable place. And now that hard work is on a path to being deprecated by moving to a completely new language and set of underlying technologies.
Taking the project from a handful of contributors to a production-ready technology within an existing ecosystem is a non-trivial task. I'm sure it will come together eventually, but the commitment to ship it "early next year" seems unlikely to me.