In InfluxDB Cloud, the author creates a new bucket for downsampled data and uses Flux, a general-purpose data transformation language, to compress the data. The author writes a query that takes the last 5 minutes of data from the raw bucket, computes a mean, and puts this data into the new "compressed" bucket. A task is created to run this query every five minutes. To create a dashboard, the author selects the compressed data and configures the chart to refresh automatically. The author also adds a gauge to display the current soil moisture level from the uncompressed bucket.