Migrating A Newsletter Analytics Platform From Open Source ClickHouse To ClickHouse Cloud

The Challenge

Our client operates a SaaS platform that provides newsletter publishers with detailed analytics about their subscribers, open rates, click-through rates, and engagement patterns. They track millions of email events per day across hundreds of newsletter publishers.

The platform was running on a self-managed open source ClickHouse deployment. As their customer base grew, they began experiencing performance issues and were concerned about the security and scalability of their infrastructure.

They engaged us to conduct a thorough review of their ClickHouse deployment and provide recommendations for improvement.

Customer Pain Points

The customer were experiencing the following challenges prior to the engagement:

Performance degradation as data volumes increased, with some analytical queries taking minutes to complete.
Security concerns around their self-managed infrastructure including lack of encryption at rest and inadequate access controls.
Scalability limitations with their current cluster configuration unable to handle peak traffic periods.
Operational burden of managing and maintaining the ClickHouse infrastructure in-house.
Suboptimal schema design leading to inefficient storage and query patterns.

Our Technical Approach

We took the following approach to this project:

Conducted a comprehensive audit of their existing ClickHouse deployment covering performance, security, scalability, and operational practices.
Produced a detailed report with over 30 recommendations spanning schema optimisation, query tuning, security hardening, and infrastructure improvements.
Designed an improved schema leveraging ClickHouse best practices including appropriate sort keys, data skipping indices, and materialized views for common query patterns.
Planned and executed a migration to ClickHouse Cloud, ensuring zero downtime and data integrity throughout the process.
Provided hands-on support during the migration, including data validation, performance testing, and application integration.

Outcomes

Key outcomes of the project included:

Delivered a comprehensive audit report identifying critical security, performance, and scalability issues.
Successfully migrated to ClickHouse Cloud with improved security posture including encryption at rest and fine-grained access controls.
Achieved significant query performance improvements through schema optimisation and proper indexing strategies.
Reduced operational overhead by moving to a fully managed cloud solution.
Upskilled customer engineers on ClickHouse best practices and ongoing maintenance procedures.