Arc Time-Series Database on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS by cloudimg

Arc is a high performance open source time series and analytical database from Basekick Labs, distributed under the AGPL 3.0 licence. It combines a high throughput ingestion pipeline with the DuckDB analytical query engine and stores every record as open Apache Parquet files on your own storage, so your data is never locked into a proprietary format.

This cloudimg image turns a single virtual machine and its dedicated data disk into a ready to use time series database. Arc is installed from the official Basekick Labs package, pinned and checksum verified, and runs as a hardened systemd service under a dedicated non login account. There is no JVM, no Python environment, no external metadata store and no cluster to operate: Arc is one statically linked binary that carries ingestion, storage, compaction, SQL query and backup in a single process.

Security is configured out of the box. Arc token authentication is enabled, so every query, write and administrative route requires a bearer token, and only the liveness probes are public. A unique admin API token and a unique TLS certificate are generated on the first boot of every virtual machine, which means no credential is ever baked into the image and no two deployments share a secret. Arc terminates TLS itself on port 8000, so tokens never cross the network in clear text. Usage telemetry is switched off in this image, so the appliance never reports to a third party.

Data is written to a dedicated data disk mounted at /var/lib/arc/data, captured into the image and re provisioned on every virtual machine, so your time series store is independently sized, snapshotted and resized. Background compaction merges small Parquet files automatically to keep queries fast and storage costs low.

Arc speaks the InfluxDB line protocol, so Telegraf and existing InfluxDB 1.x clients can write to it without code changes, and it also accepts MessagePack columnar and MQTT ingestion. Queries are standard analytical SQL with window functions, common table expressions, joins and aggregations, returned as JSON or Apache Arrow. Prometheus format metrics are exposed for monitoring.

Typical uses are observability and metrics storage, industrial and IoT sensor telemetry, product analytics and event data, and any workload that needs fast ingestion with fast analytical queries over open file formats.

The image is built on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, fully patched at capture, with unattended security updates left enabled. It ships with a step by step cloudimg deployment guide and 24/7 cloudimg support.