Altinity.Cloud 101

Getting started with Altinity.Cloud

Altinity.Cloud Introduction

Welcome to Altinity.Cloud! In this introduction, we will be answering a few simple questions:

What is Altinity.Cloud?

Altinity.Cloud is a fully managed ClickHouse® services provider. Altinity.Cloud is the easiest way to set up a ClickHouse cluster with different configurations of shards and replicas. From one user interface you can create ClickHouse clusters, monitor their performance, run queries against them, populate them with data from S3 or other cloud stores, and other essential operations.

This documentation is divided into these sections:

What Can I Do with Altinity.Cloud?

Altinity.Cloud lets you create, manage, and monitor ClickHouse clusters through the Altinity Cloud Manager (ACM). The ACM user interface looks like this:

Clusters View
Figure 1 - The ACM user interface

There are several common tasks you can perform directly from this panel:

  • Create a ClickHouse cluster - The Launch Cluster button starts the Launch Cluster Wizard, an easy way to create a new ClickHouse cluster.
  • Manage a ClickHouse cluster - The figure above shows the cluster panels for the clickhouse101 and github clusters. The many features of cluster panels are detailed in the Altinity Cloud Manager documentation.
  • Manage environments - An Altinity.Cloud environment contains one or more ClickHouse clusters. In the figure above, the current environment is demo. Clicking on the environment name displays a list of all the environments available to the user. Environments are discussed in more detail in the Account Management section.
  • Manage accounts - You can change your password and other settings for your account. In the figure above, user John Doe is logged in; clicking on the user icon shows a menu of account management options. See the section Working with your account for more information.

Other tasks supported by the Altinity Cloud Manager UI but not shown here include:

  • Monitor a cluster - You can monitor the performance of each cluster in real-time with a Grafana dashboard. See Monitoring a Cluster in the User Guide for more information.
  • Work with a database - The UI includes a panel that lets you connect to a ClickHouse cluster and do a number of useful things, including creating databases and schemas, running queries against a database, and loading a database with data from S3. The Quick Start Guide explains everything with a section on the Cluster Explorer.
  • Work with backups - You have many flexible options for defining when backups are taken and where they are stored. You can also restore a cluster from a backup. The section How to use Altinity Backup and the Restore Wizard has all the details.
  • Configure cluster uptime - You can define when your server should be shut down to conserve resources. See the Uptime Schedule Settings section for all the details.
  • Manage user accounts - If you have Administrator access, you can create accounts for other members of your organization. All the details are in the Account Management section of the Administrator Guide.

How is Altinity.Cloud organized?

The various components of Altinity.Cloud are arranged as follows:

  • Organizations have one or more environments that service your company. Altinity.Cloud starts at the Organization level - that’s your company. When you and members of your team log into Altinity.Cloud, you’ll start here.
  • Accounts have roles and permissions that allow each user to interact with Altinity.Cloud. An Administrator account can create and modify accounts for others, but most accounts simply have access to one or more environments and ClickHouse clusters within those environments.
  • Environments are a group of CluckHouse clusters. Working with environments lets you control access and resources at the cluster level.
  • Clusters are sets of replicas that work together to replicate data and improve performance. Clusters consist of one or more Nodes.
  • Nodes are individual virtual machines or containers that run ClickHouse.
  • Shards are groups of nodes that work together to share data and improve performance and reliability.
  • Replicas are groups of shards that mirror data and performance so when one replica goes down, they can keep going. Shards can then be set as replicas, where groups of nodes are copied. If one replica goes down, the other replicas can keep running and copy their synced data when the replica is restored or a new replica is added.

For details, see these topics in the Security Guide:

Where can I find out more?

Altinity provides the following resources to our customers and the Open Source community: