I've operated petabyte-scale ClickHouse clusters for 5 years

Hacker News Top News

Summary

The article shares lessons learned from operating petabyte-scale ClickHouse clusters for five years, discussing best practices and promoting Tinybird's managed data services.

No content available
Original Article
View Cached Full Text

Cached at: 09/11/26, 05:24 PM

# I've operated petabyte-scale ClickHouse® clusters for 5 years Source: [https://www.tinybird.co/blog/what-i-learned-operating-clickhouse](https://www.tinybird.co/blog/what-i-learned-operating-clickhouse) [https://www.tinybird.co/](https://www.tinybird.co/)[Pricing](https://www.tinybird.co/pricing)[Docs](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/forward/quickstarts) ![Bars](https://www.tinybird.co/_next/static/immutable/media/bars.10dgnlzf359hj.png) Data Platform [Managed ClickHouse® Production\-ready with Tinybird's DX](https://www.tinybird.co/product/managed-clickhouse)[Ingest Plug in your data, ship in minutes](https://www.tinybird.co/product/ingest)[Query Sub\-second SQL APIs for your data platform](https://www.tinybird.co/product/query)[Kafka Connector Real\-time analytics over your Kafka topics](https://www.tinybird.co/product/kafka) Developer Experience [AI\-focused DevEx Built for agents and developers](https://www.tinybird.co/product/ai)[Schema iteration Safe migrations with zero downtime](https://www.tinybird.co/product/schema-iteration)[Branches Zero\-copy, full\-stack environments with prod data](https://www.tinybird.co/product/branches)[Workspace Monitor, explore, and operate your data infrastructure](https://www.tinybird.co/product/workspace) Enterprise [SaaS and Enterprise Ship real\-time at enterprise scale](https://www.tinybird.co/product/enterprise)[Cluster management Keep the controls, skip the cluster ops](https://www.tinybird.co/product/cluster-management)[Support You're not on call alone](https://www.tinybird.co/product/support)[Organizations Let every team ship, keep one place in control](https://www.tinybird.co/product/organizations) [Sign in](https://cloud.tinybird.co/login)[Sign up](https://cloud.tinybird.co/signup) Product \[\] Data Platform [Managed ClickHouse® Production\-ready with Tinybird's DX](https://www.tinybird.co/product/managed-clickhouse)[Ingest Plug in your data, ship in minutes](https://www.tinybird.co/product/ingest)[Query Sub\-second SQL APIs for your data platform](https://www.tinybird.co/product/query)[Kafka Connector Real\-time analytics over your Kafka topics](https://www.tinybird.co/product/kafka) Developer Experience [AI\-focused DevEx Built for agents and developers](https://www.tinybird.co/product/ai)[Schema iteration Safe migrations with zero downtime](https://www.tinybird.co/product/schema-iteration)[Branches Zero\-copy, full\-stack environments with prod data](https://www.tinybird.co/product/branches)[Workspace Monitor, explore, and operate your data infrastructure](https://www.tinybird.co/product/workspace) Enterprise [SaaS and Enterprise Ship real\-time at enterprise scale](https://www.tinybird.co/product/enterprise)[Cluster management Keep the controls, skip the cluster ops](https://www.tinybird.co/product/cluster-management)[Support You're not on call alone](https://www.tinybird.co/product/support)[Organizations Let every team ship, keep one place in control](https://www.tinybird.co/product/organizations) [Pricing](https://www.tinybird.co/pricing)[Docs](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/forward/quickstarts) Resources \[\] Learn [Blog Musings on transformations, tables and everything in between](https://www.tinybird.co/blog)[Customer Stories We help software teams ship features with massive data sets](https://www.tinybird.co/customer-stories)[Videos Learn how to use Tinybird with our videos](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpaq31GdKM0sqDOiT30g0pg)[ClickHouse® Course A comprehensive developer course on ClickHouse®](https://www.tinybird.co/clickhouse-course) Build [Templates Explore our collection of templates](https://www.tinybird.co/templates)[Tinybird Builds We build stuff live with Tinybird and our partners](https://www.tinybird.co/builds)[Changelog The latest updates to Tinybird](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/changelog) Community [Slack Community Join our Slack community to get help and share your ideas](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/community)[Open Source Program Get help adding Tinybird to your open source project](https://www.tinybird.co/open-source-program)[Schema \> Evolution Join the most read technical biweekly engineering newsletter](https://www.tinybird.co/schema-evolution) ## Blog ## Skip the infra work\. Deploy your first ClickHouse® project now\. [Get started for free](https://cloud.tinybird.co/signup)[Read the docs](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/forward/quickstarts) ![A geometric decoration with a matrix of rectangles.](https://www.tinybird.co/_next/static/immutable/media/pipe-matrix-static.1o7d514hw5rwx.svg) Product/ [Watch the demo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB4UPBuSDSM)[Pricing](https://www.tinybird.co/pricing)[Security](https://www.tinybird.co/security)[Contact sales](https://www.tinybird.co/contact-us) Company/ [About Us](https://www.tinybird.co/about)[Shop](https://shop.tinybird.co/)[Careers](https://www.tinybird.co/about#join-us) Features/ [Managed ClickHouse](https://www.tinybird.co/product/managed-clickhouse)[Ingest](https://www.tinybird.co/product/ingest)[Query](https://www.tinybird.co/product/query)[Kafka Connector](https://www.tinybird.co/product/kafka)[AI\-focused DevEx](https://www.tinybird.co/product/ai)[Schema Iteration](https://www.tinybird.co/product/schema-iteration)[Branches](https://www.tinybird.co/product/branches)[Workspace](https://www.tinybird.co/product/workspace)[Cluster Management](https://www.tinybird.co/product/cluster-management)[Organizations](https://www.tinybird.co/product/organizations) Support/ [Plans](https://www.tinybird.co/product/support)[Documentation](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/forward/support)[SQL Reference](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/sql-reference)[Community](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/community)[Changelog](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/changelog) Resources/ [Observability](https://www.tinybird.co/observability)[Blog](https://www.tinybird.co/blog)[AI Resources](https://www.tinybird.co/blog/category/ai-resources)[Customer Stories](https://www.tinybird.co/customer-stories)[Templates](https://www.tinybird.co/templates)[Tinybird Builds](https://www.tinybird.co/builds)[Glossary](https://www.tinybird.co/glossary)[RSS Feed](https://www.tinybird.co/blog/rss.xml)[Newsletter](https://www.tinybird.co/schema-evolution) Integrations/ [Apache Kafka](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/forward/get-data-in/connectors/kafka)[Confluent Cloud](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/forward/get-data-in/connectors/kafka)[Redpanda](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/forward/get-data-in/connectors/kafka)[Google BigQuery](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/forward/get-data-in/guides/ingest-from-bigquery-using-google-cloud-storage)[Snowflake](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/forward/get-data-in/guides/ingest-from-snowflake-using-aws-s3)[Postgres Table Function](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/forward/get-data-in/table-functions/postgresql)[Amazon DynamoDB](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/forward/get-data-in/connectors)[Amazon S3](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/forward/get-data-in/connectors/s3) [Use Cases/](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/use-cases)[User\-facing dashboards](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/use-cases/user-facing-dashboards)[Real\-time Change Data Capture \(CDC\)](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/use-cases/realtime-cdc)[Gaming analytics](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/use-cases/gaming-analytics)[Web analytics](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/use-cases/web-analytics)[Real\-time personalization](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/use-cases/realtime-personalization)[User\-generated content \(UGC\) analytics](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/use-cases/ugc-analytics)[Content recommendation systems](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/use-cases/content-recommendation)[Vector search](https://www.tinybird.co/docs/use-cases/vector-search) [All systems operational](https://status.tinybird.co/) Copyright ©2026Tinybird\. All rights reserved \| [Terms & conditions](https://www.tinybird.co/terms-and-conditions)[Cookies](https://www.tinybird.co/privacy#cookies)[Trust Center](https://trust.tinybird.co/)[Compliance Helpline](https://tinybird.factorialhr.co/complaints) ![Tinybird wordmark](https://www.tinybird.co/_next/static/immutable/media/cropped-wordmark.2h1vxqu87g37p.svg)

Similar Articles

Clickhouse is winning the Observability Wars

Lobsters Hottest

The article argues that ClickHouse has become the dominant database for observability due to its performance handling high-volume, time-ordered logs, solving long-standing log management challenges.

Every Millisecond Counts

Lobsters Hottest

This blog post details incremental optimizations to reduce ClickHouse query latency from over 85 seconds to sub-second, including changes to partition keys, join elimination, and aggressive merges.

Andy Pavlo Joins ClickHouse to Establish ClickHouse Labs

Hacker News Top

Andy Pavlo, a renowned database professor from Carnegie Mellon, joins ClickHouse to establish and lead ClickHouse Labs, a new research group focused on advancing database technology and integrating innovations into ClickHouse and PostgreSQL.