Amazon Kinesis vs. ClickHouse

Amazon Kinesis is a great replacement for Kafka and it works better whenever the components of the solution are AWS based. Best if extended fan-out is not required, but still price-performance ratio is very good for simplifying maintenance.

I would go with a different option if the systems to be connected are legacy, for instance in the case of traditional messaging clients.

Incentivized

The most important thing when using ClickHouse is to be clear that the scenarios in which you want to use it really are the right ones. Many users think that when a database is very fast for a specific use case, it can be extrapolated to other contexts (most of the time different) in which a previous analysis has not been carried out.

ClickHouse is an analytical database, as such, it should be used for such purposes, where the information is stored correctly, the data volumes are really large and the queries to be performed are not the typical traditional queries on several columns with multiple aggregations. ClickHouse is not the solution for this.

On the other hand, if your case is not one of the above, it is quite possible that ClickHouse can help you. Where ClickHouse shines is when you are looking for aggregation over a particular column in large volumes of data.

Incentivized

• Processing huge loads of data
• Integrating well with IoT Platform on Amazon
• Integration with overall AWS Ecosystem
• Scalability

Incentivized

• Their MergeTree table engine provide impressive performance for data insert in bulk
• Not only data insert but also the way MergeTree engine uses Primary Keys to sort the data and perform data skipping based on the granules its also their secret for ridiculous fast queries
• Data compression its also great
• They provide especial table engines that allow you to read data directly from other sources like S3
• Since its written with C++ you have very granular data types and especial ones like enum, LowCardinality and etc, they save you a lot of storage since are stored as integer values
• ClickHouse functions besides the ones that respect ANSI Standards are also awesome and useful

Incentivized

• Not a queue system, so little visibility into "backlog" if there is any
• Confusing terminology to make sure events aren't missed
• Sometimes didn't seem to trigger Lambda functions, or dropped events when a lot came in

Incentivized

• Avro data manipulation
• Kafka consistency
• DDL operations errors (by replica configuration)

Incentivized

The documentation was confusing and lacked examples. The streams suddenly stopped working with no explanation and there was no information in the logs. All these were more difficult when dealing with enhanced fan-out. In fact, we were about to abort the usage of Kinesis due to a misunderstanding with enhanced fan-out.

Incentivized

The main benefit was around set up - incredibly easy to just start using Kinesis. Kinesis is a real-time data processing platform, while Kafka is more of a message queue system. If you only need a message queue from a limited source, Kafka may do the job. More complex use cases, with low latency, higher volume of data, real time decisions and integration with multiple sources and destination at a decent price, Kinesis is better.

Incentivized

ClickHouse outperforms, especially in costs, since its compression/indexing engines are so smart, and even with very low computing power, you can already perform huge analyses of the data.

Incentivized

• Caused us to need to re-engineer some basic re-try logic
• Caused us to drop some content without knowing it
• Made monitoring much more difficult
• We eventually switched back to SQS because Kinesis is not the same as a Queue system

Incentivized

• Queries that used to take more than 2 minutes now take less than 1 second
• Possibility to analyze use cases in real time (before was impossible)
• The applications are more complete and the users decisions are better

Incentivized