Altinity.Cloud 101

Getting started with Altinity.Cloud

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.

It may be helpful to look at the architecture of Altinity.Cloud to understand

This documentation is divided into these sections:

  • Quick Start Guide - Setting up an Altinity.Cloud account and creating your own ClickHouse clusters.
  • User Guide - Working with your ClickHouse clusters.
  • Administrator Guide - In-depth technical details for administrators, including setting up environments, user accounts, and backups.
  • Security Guide - Keeping your ClickHouse clusters and their data safe and secure.
  • Connecting to Altinity.Cloud - Integrating your ClickHouse clusters with other parts of your infrastructure.
  • Altinity.Cloud Demo Cluster - Using our sample ClickHouse environment through the Altinity Cloud Manager.

What are the different ways to run Altinity.Cloud?

There are three ways to run Altinity.Cloud. You can let us handle the infrastructure for you, so you can focus on your data and your analytics applications. If you prefer (or if you need to), you can take complete control and manage it yourself. The different ways of doing things are:

  • Use Altinity’s cloud account - Altinity manages all of the infrastructure for you. Think of this as ClickHouse as a Service. This is available on four cloud providers: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Hetzner.
  • Use your cloud account - You run Altinity.Cloud inside your cloud account. You give Altinity very specific access to your account, then you can use Altinity.Cloud to provision ClickHouse clusters in your account. That means all of the compute and storage resources are under your control.

    This is available on four cloud providers: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Hetzner, or you can run Altinity.Cloud in your Kubernetes environment.
  • Use a cloud provider marketplace - You can also use Altinity.Cloud through the AWS Marketplace or the GCP Marketplace.

As you would expect, our responsibilities are different depending on your choice here. For example, we’re responsible for managing our own cloud account, but we can’t manage yours. And we’re responsible for managing the Kubernetes environment, unless you’ve told us you’re going to manage that yourself. See the Altinity Responsibility Model for complete details.

Using our cloud account is straightforward. Letting us use your cloud account or your Kubernetes infrastructure is more complicated. In a nutshell, you need to give Altinity very specific permissions to allocate resources in your account. Here’s what you need to know to set up Altinity.Cloud in your cloud account:

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 section Viewing Clusters in the ACM of the User Guide.
  • 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. See the section Working with Environments in the Administrator Guide for all the details.
  • 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 and running queries against a database. See the Cluster Explorer documentation for all the details.
  • 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 Backing up and Restoring Data has all the details.
  • Configure cluster activity - You can define when your server will run as well as the kinds of nodes the ClickHouse cluster will use. You can define schedules for stopping and resuming the cluster or for scaling the cluster up and down to different node types. See Configuring Activity Schedules 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:

  • Altinity Documentation Site - The official documentation for Altinity.Cloud, Altinity.Cloud Anywhere, Altinity Stable® Builds, and related products. (Spoiler alert: you’re here already.)
  • The Altinity Knowledge Base An open source, community-driven place to learn about ClickHouse configurations and answers to questions.
  • The Altinity Home Page Learn about other resources, meetups, training, conferences, and more.
  • The Altinity Community Slack Channel - Work with Altinity engineers and other ClickHouse users to get answers to your problems and share your solutions.