There's nothing to stop somebody else from coming along and building a version with clustering support. Whether that will happen or not is, of course, an open q

There's nothing to stop somebody else from coming along and building a version with clustering support. Whether that will happen or not is, of course, an open question. Clustering is really really hard. My personal experience with that class of problem is that it took 3 years to get it production ready, and that was for a simpler problem than what needs to be solved here. The chances of a 3rd party implementing this given that InfluxData plan to have a commercial version seem very low. I'd expect that most companies who want to stay open source will treat this as a standard database that needs client-side sharding and HA (which is the recommend approach - see https://influxdata.com/high-availability/ https://influxdata.com/high-availability/).