Altinity.Cloud 101

Getting started with Altinity.Cloud

Welcome to Altinity.Cloud! In this introduction, we’ll cover several important topics':

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:

  • 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 Can I Do with Altinity.Cloud?

Altinity.Cloud lets you create, manage, and monitor ClickHouse clusters through the Altinity Cloud Manager (ACM). Here are some of the common tasks that the ACM makes easy:

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.

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.

Open-source analytic stack

Altinity.Cloud uses open-source software for the analytic stack and selected management services–the Altinity Kubernetes Operator for ClickHouse, Loki, Prometheus, and Grafana. The following diagram shows the principal components of our architecture.

Altinity.Cloud Management Plane
Figure 1 - Altinity.Cloud’s open-source analytic stack

Your applications work with your ClickHouse data through the Altinity.Cloud access point. Altinity.Cloud then uses the Altinity Connector inside the kubernetes cluster to work ClickHouse. The ACM makes it easy to control access to the access point via standard techniques like whitelisting, access tokens, and RBAC. See the Best Practices section of the Security Guide for the details.

Service architecture

The Altinity.Cloud service architecture consists of a management plane that makes it easy to work with resources in your Altinity.Cloud account as well as a data plane that hosts your ClickHouse clusters and other infrastructure. The dedicated Kubernetes cluster in Figure 2 below is the cluster shown in more detail in Figure 1 above.

Altinity.Cloud Service Architecture

Figure 2 - The Altinity.Cloud service architecture

Whether you’re running Altinity.Cloud in your cloud or Altinity’s, the architecture is the same.

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:

What are Altinity’s responsibilities? What are my responsibilities?

Depending on where you run Altinity.Cloud, the division of labor between Altinity and you is different. If you’re running in your cloud account or Kubernetes environment, there are many things that are simply out of our control. On the other hand, if you’re running in our cloud, most things are on us. This figure shows the division of responsibilities for all three scenarios:

Figure 2 - The Altinity Responsibility Model
Figure 2 - The Altinity Responsibility Model

Applications

As you would expect, your applications and their data are completely under your control.

High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and Resiliency

Although Altinity provides a number of features to make HA and DR easier, it’s still up to you to make sure the way you’re using those features meets your needs. For example, the Altinity Cloud Manager makes it easy to configure backups and define where they should be stored, but it’s up to you to make sure those settings meet your needs for availability, disaster recovery, data sovereignty, and other requirements.

ClickHouse Clusters

No matter where you’re running Altinity.Cloud, we handle creating, managing, and upgrading your ClickHouse clusters. It’s easy to create ClickHouse clusters with the Launch Cluster Wizard, and the User Guide, the Administrator Guide, and the Security Guide have complete details on working with, configuring, and security your clusters.

Kubernetes Environments

If you’re running in Altinity’s cloud account or your own, we handle Kubernetes for you. Otherwise, (you’re running Altinity.Cloud in your Kubernetes environment), it’s up to you to provision, monitor, and update that environment. The section Running Altinity.Cloud in Your Kubernetes Environment(BYOK) has complete details.

VPC Layer

If you’re running Altinity.Cloud in your Kubernetes environment, it’s up to you to handle the VPC layer. Otherwise (you’re running in Altinity’s cloud account or your own), we handle the VPC layer for you.

Cloud Account

If you’re running Altinity.Cloud in our cloud, your cloud resources are billed through your Altinity.Cloud account. For Bring Your Own Cloud or Bring Your Own Kubernetes environments, those cloud resources are running in your account, so those charges are on you. As you work with your ClickHouse clusters in the Altinity Cloud Manager, the ACM will provision resources as needed.

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 Stable® Builds, the ALtinity Kubernetes Operator for ClickHouse, and related products and open-source projects. (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.