2023++

ByAlexander Zaitsev
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One of my favorite books of all time is “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” It has a lot of insightful quotes. One of my favorites is this one: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” In 2023, it took Altinity plenty of running to keep up the momentum, and we managed to run even faster to discover more opportunities for our users and ourselves.

Let’s take a look back and see what happened during our 2023 run.

Altinity.Stable builds

Altinity.Stable builds are open source ClickHouse builds with three year support tails and feature backports. We released two significant updates in 2023: 22.8 and 23.3. All Altinity.Stable builds come together with detailed release notes and upgrade instructions that make it easier for users to plan and execute upgrades. 

But this was not enough. We also extended Altinity.Stable builds with FIPS-compatible versions, and added ARM support, both long-standing user requests

And now, here is the first Christmas gift for our users: Altinity.Stable 23.8 has been just released!

Altinity.Cloud

Altinity.Cloud was the first on the market and offers the best cloud management service for ClickHouse with outstanding flexibility to users. Altinity.Cloud can run any ClickHouse version in any location and gives users complete control over cloud resources like VMs and storage. 

Altinity.Cloud rapidly evolved in 2023 while showing tremendous growth. We have released seven major UI updates, adding new features and improving user experience. We also made three significant infrastructure expansions:

And there is a second Christmas gift for our users! We are happy to announce Altinity.Cloud Terraform provider and public cloud API!

ClickHouse

Altinity remains an active contributor to the open source ClickHouse ecosystem. In 2023, Altinity developers submitted 140 merged pull requests to ClickHouse server and client libraries. Altinity support engineers logged more than 500 issues with bug reports or improvement requests. 

ClickHouse is a great example of open source collaboration, so we initiated the S3 project to deliver better object storage support to open source ClickHouse. The project is in active development and we expect it to be released in Q1/2024.

Speaking of open source, we have also released several updates to clickhouse-operator for Kubernetes, which reached a remarkable 1500 stars on Github. Another popular ecosystem project, clickhouse-backup, is just slightly behind with 1100 stars. Our new baby, clickhouse-sink-connector, is not so popular yet, but we expect it to gain more traction next year.

Kubernetes

The Altinity Kubernetes journey started in 2019. Since then, Kubernetes has evolved into the core technology for Altinity cloud products. We return innovations back to the community with the aforementioned clickhouse-operator, which is one of the most popular Kubernetes operators for databases ever. We also continue to release smaller projects like the ebs-params-controller, which enables users to change AWS EBS storage parameters dynamically.

Altinity is an active contributor of the Data-on-Kubernetes (DoK) community and participates in several SIGs. Altinity CEO, Robert Hodges, gives regular talks at KubeCon conferences. These included highlighting Altinity innovations in storage management as well as security. 

We have also started looking into ArgoCD support in order to simplify ClickHouse deployment automation. And we are hatching ambitious plans to make ClickHouse a standard tool for analytics in Kubernetes.

OSA CON 2023

Altinity organized the first OSA CON conference in 2021 to bring together creators and users of open source analytic software. 250 people signed up. Two years later, it’s a major online conference. OSA CON 2023 had more than 2000 registrations to attend 43 talks from industry leaders, all about open source software. OSA CON is no longer just a conference but the beginning of a new community that is helping users build the open source, modern data stack. We are excited that Altinity is a leader. 

2024

At the end of the year everybody likes making plans for the future. We have a lot of plans for 2024 as well. Let me share some of them. 

We are going to start the new year with the public announcement of the Altinity.Stable build for ClickHouse 23.8.

We plan to enable object storage support for Altinity.Cloud customers as a GA feature.

We will add ClickHouse Keeper support into clickhouse-operator, as well as more security and observability features.

We are going to release a major update to the community clickhouse-grafana plugin to adapt to rapid changes of Grafana itself. The integration with Grafana Cloud for our users follows after that. Plus we have a list of new features on the way. With over 11M downloads to date, it’s far and away the most popular way to connect Grafana to ClickHouse.

We will continue our campaign to manage ClickHouse in any Kubernetes environment that our users need, adding new cloud providers and making Altinity.Cloud deployments easier to use.

Finally, we plan to add more managed services to Altinity.Cloud that will simplify operating open source analytic stacks for our users. Stay tuned for many more announcements in 2024. 

2023 would not be successful without the Altinity team and Altinity users. I am honored to work together with 45 of the most talented people in the database industry serving the best customers on the planet. In these final days of 2023 I would like to say thank you to the Altinity team, and thank you to Altinity users! We wish you the Happiest New Year! See you soon in 2024!

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