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Scaling Strategies
TL;DR
ClickHouse setup is easy, but keeping it running is hard. Different scaling strategies for different problems: vertical scaling for latency reduction, horizontal scaling for concurrency, and dedicated ingestion proxies for write scaling. Profile your query workloads before choosing a scaling strategy. Real-time, long-running, and very-long-running queries require completely different approaches.
Setup vs. Operations
Quote
"Setting up a ClickHouse cluster is fairly easy, but the hard part is keeping it running."
What you'll deal with in production
- Read traffic spikes: Sudden increases require immediate scaling decisions
- Long-running queries: Heavy queries block other operations and impact performance
- Write peaks: Ingestion spikes overwhelm merge capacity, causing slowdowns
The gap between setup and operations is significant. What works in development often fails in production due to scale, concurrency, and real-world traffic patterns. Plan for operational complexity from day one.