InfluxDB v0.5.0-rc1 has been released, introducing significant improvements to clustering, data distribution, write buffering, and continuous queries. The new release uses a sharding style to distribute data across shards based on time, enabling efficient operations such as dropping entire shards and expanding clusters with new servers. A write ahead log has also been added to buffer writes to the local datastore and keep a short-term log of writes for server failures. Continuous queries have been upgraded to denormalize data into multiple series, allowing users to create indexes from column values. The release is considered stable but not yet production-ready, with some caveats including the need to delete old Raft and DB directories during upgrades.