How to scale out your ClickHouse cluster?

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. (Albert Einstein)

Summary

Any application/website that sees significant growth will eventually need to scale to accommodate traffic increases and deal with performance bottlenecks.

It’s critical that scaling is done in a way that ensures the integrity of their data. Before starting, you need to understand the limitations to determine which solution provides the greatest benefit for you.

Scaling has a price, either in terms of cost, performance, or usability

The problem / motivation

When you add one or more nodes to your database, ClickHouse doesn't have a built-in automatic feature able to rebalance data in the cluster.

A rebalance operation can take some time and can be very sensitive and complex if you should allow the process to be completely uninterrupted and ensure the integrity of your data.

Quick recap: How does scaling look like?

Scaling main challenges

• Resharding: adding new shards to the CH cluster

here S is shard, R is Replica.

• Rebalancing or not the data
  The scaling operation should be resumed to add only new shards to the cluster without any rebalancing operation.
  In this case, only new data will be distributed across all the shards but any queries on historical data will fetch data across the old topology. They will not benefit from the improvement of the scale-out operation.
  That’s why we decide to rebalance all the historical data on the new topology (across all the shards).

Few solutions explored

1 — clickhouse-copier

https://clickhouse.tech/docs/en/operations/utilities/clickhouse-copier/

• part of standard CH server distribution

• copies data from the tables in one cluster to tables in another (or the same) cluster.

• initially designed for when source and target clusters are different

solution #1: build a new cluster with a new topology and migrate data with clickhouse-copier (from source_cluster to target_cluster)

solution #2 (resharding in place): add shards to the existing cluster, create a new database ( target_db ) and migrate data with clickhouse-copier ( from source_db to target_db )

clickhouse-copier is a powerful tool to move data between ClickHouse clusters of any topology but migrate/copy data from your Prod environment can be risky and downgrade your performance time during the operation. Of course, you can also build a copy of your prod cluster and migrate from it but is an expensive solution.

2 — native import/export

• export data in native format from source_cluster

• import data to target_cluster (n shards)

Native format :

• is the most efficient format: data is written and read by blocks in binary format

• this format is “columnar”: it doesn’t convert columns to rows.

• this is the format used in the native interface for interaction between servers, for using the command-line client

Another approach: ClickHouse and object storage — S3 table function

• NEW: merged more than a year ago

• For mergeTree table data

• Basic import/export functionality

INSERT INTO FUNCTION s3(...) SELECT * FROM tableINSERT INTO table SELECT * FROM s3(bucket, format, structure, compression)

Native import/export is a basic and solid solution but the cost of disk storage used for it can not be ignored.

3 — Kafka table engines

• Kafka table engine encapsulates topic within ClickHouse

• topic contains messages

• materialized view to transferring data to the final table in target_cluster

Kafka table engine is not mature enough and has poor log experience to use it in the production environment. Also is supposed to install and pay for Kafka infrastructure.

Don’t make the process harder than it is. (Jack Welch)

All previous solutions described are not robust enough and simple to run in a production environment without any “unexpected” surprises, bugs, or crashes.

My “desired” solution suppose to be :

• easy to deploy, to use, and simple to automate

• scalable: be able to reduce time to proceed with this operation

• robust: any progress should be saved to external storage

• cost-effective: don't need expensive architecture/infrastructure

Let’s cook it! no better to describe the “recipe” to scale-out CH cluster from n to m shards with swim diagram as below:

Ingredients / supplies

1. The full backup copy of your original CH cluster in external storage

2. The “resharding-cooker” :

• create CH cluster (m shards) with 2 databases: source_db installed on n shards and default database on m shards

• using clickhouse-backup to restore data into source_db

• using clickhouse-copier to migrate data from source_db to default (resharding in place)

• using clickhouse-backup to backup data from default

Now we have the foundations to rebalance the data. We just need to automate the operation to be simple, robust, scalable, and cost-effective.

This solution is fully scalable: you can deploy few clusters (with m instances each) and execute in a loop the daily operation described above.

3. When you’ve finished the entire operation and already backup all your database in the new topology, just you need to :

• create a new CH cluster

• and restore it from external storage (operation)

That’s it — you scaled up your CH cluster !!

https://medium.com/@tsitbon/how-to-scale-out-your-clickhouse-cluster-aaccfd111a37