Altinity Empowers Developers to Quickly Deploy ClickHouse in the Cloud Using AWS

Founded in 2017, Altinity offers consulting and fully managed services to users of ClickHouse. When the company was founded, many of its customers deployed ClickHouse on premises, which came with challenges such as creating a network, scaling compute, and performing backups. As a developer-first company, Altinity wanted to provide a way for its customers to deploy ClickHouse in the cloud without having to worry about managing infrastructure. “The idea is to empower ordinary developers to build applications without having to be experts in the underlying technology,” says Robert Hodges, CEO of Altinity. “We smooth out the learning curve for them.”

Altinity decided to build Altinity.Cloud on AWS because about half its customers were already using AWS to run ClickHouse in the cloud. “AWS is the most popular cloud environment and has helped us meet our customers’ requirements for accessing our cloud and attaching it to their applications,” says Hodges.

In 2018, Altinity developed Altinity.Cloud on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)—a trusted way to start, run, and scale Kubernetes—and then launched the new offering to the public in 2020. Using Amazon EKS has saved Altinity, which has a small team of nine developers, the equivalent of two full-time employees’ workloads. More importantly, it helps Altinity focus its attention on high-quality services running inside Kubernetes.

Using Altinity.Cloud, Altinity’s customers can access near-real-time analytics and petabytes of historical data, which they use for everything from security monitoring to delivering personalized ecommerce experiences. Using Altinity.Cloud, customers have the flexibility to run the data warehouse wherever they want: in their own cloud or in Altinity’s cloud.

Altinity has also used various AWS services to meet its customers’ security and compliance needs. The company successfully participated in SOC 2, an audit report that evaluates a service organization’s controls related to the security, availability, and processing integrity of its system. “AWS security solutions are outstanding,” says Hodges. “It’s important that we give our customers the ability to own and control their data and apply their security policies to their data warehouses.”

Altinity now has a total of 100 customers on the cloud, and its revenue for Altinity.Cloud grew by more than six times in 2022 alone. In that same year, Altinity added a new feature called Altinity.Cloud Anywhere, which helps customers deploy ClickHouse in their own Kubernetes clusters using Altinity.Cloud as the control-and-management plane.

Now that Altinity has developed a developer-friendly solution for using ClickHouse in the cloud, the company plans to address querying data lakes on AWS, which will help companies derive richer business insights.“We’re able to deliver the best possible service to our customers on AWS, which we believe is the best cloud service provider on the planet,” says Hodges.