Altinity.Cloud Has Turned Five!

Altinity.Cloud launched 5 years ago in November 2020. It was the first managed service for ClickHouse^Ⓡ on AWS. Services from DoubleCloud and Aiven followed soon after. ClickHouse Inc was founded next year and joined the cloud club with its service in late 2022.

Every year Altinity.Cloud added more new options to ClickHouse users. We often forget about it as the time goes, so sometimes it is interesting to look back in retrospect. 

Altinity.Cloud development started in 2019 when we introduced an open source Kubernetes operator for ClickHouse. Open source has been a foundation of all offerings at Altinity: not just the operator, but ClickHouse, the Grafana community plugin, and many others. It was natural to open it fully from the start. 

The operator quickly became one of the most popular Kubernetes operators for databases on GitHub. It allows users to run ClickHouse clusters by themselves in self-managed or cloud Kubernetes deployments. It also allows all users, including vendors, to build their own managed services for ClickHouse. We even saw our operator powering services in Chinese cloud providers like Tungsten Cloud or Alibaba Cloud. 

Early in 2020 we started to build Altinity cloud service, and proudly released Altinity.Cloud DBaaS in November 2020. There were a lot of sharp edges that time, but users got what they were looking for – a managed service that just works, so they could focus on building applications. We also built in expert DBA support, a unique strength of Altinity that is unusual in data platforms. It’s a key reason why we still have early customers from 2020 that are happy Altinity.Cloud users 5 years later! 

In 2021 Altinity.Cloud added GCP support. We were the only ClickHouse service provider at GCP for the next two years. GCP support was an important step; it allowed us to make Altinity.Cloud internals cloud agnostic the following year.

In 2022 Altinity.Cloud added Bring Your Own Cloud capabilities. We called it Altinity.Cloud Anywhere to highlight the ultimate deployment flexibility. That was the first BYOC offering for ClickHouse on that we know of and years ahead of the market. It was also a new platform that was easily extendable to any cloud providers and deployment configurations. It fulfilled a longstanding goal many customers requested: to enable them to deploy anywhere. 

In 2023 Altinity.Cloud added Azure support. We used our Anywhere platform to implement it, so SaaS and BYOC were deployed with the same architecture; the only difference was a target cloud account.

In 2024 Altinity.Cloud adopted Hetzner for low cost deployments. That was quite a unique experience, since we had to build Kubernetes clusters from lego blocks by themselves. Unlike major cloud providers, Hetzner does not have a managed Kubernetes service.

Finally, in 2025 Altinity.Cloud extended to data lakes by adding managed Iceberg catalogs, swarm clusters and other features of Project Antalya. These features reduce storage costs and speed up queries on very large datasets. They open up possibilities to build fast analytic applications that share data easily with new AI models.

Looking back, I must say that it was the most interesting 5 years in my life so far. I know that other Altinity folks share the same feeling. Developing cloud services is hard. It requires deep expertise, very careful engineering, and tons of testing. Many of the problems are not easy to solve. But we know that even AWS and Cloudflare have bad days sometimes, so we are not alone. We try to learn from those experiences and get better constantly. For example, the recent AWS US-East outage barely affected Altinity.Cloud.

Altinity.Cloud is successful because we care about each and every user. What we value most is the success of applications deployed using our help. Our goal is to make high performance analytics infrastructure easily available for all users, small or big, and in any operating environment. That was the main driver for Altinity.Cloud from the very beginning and it continues to be so.

Five years passed, but there is much more to come. Altinity.Cloud offers a unique combination of open source foundations, ability to run anywhere, and deep support. Fulfilling the promise puts a lot of responsibility on us that we take with dignity. We have ambitious plans, and we will be happy to share them with our users. Stay tuned!