Friendly Competition within the ClickHouse Ecosystem with Robert Hodges
Sep 18, 2024
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Robert Hodges, CEO of Altinity, shares his fascinating journey with ClickHouse, which he didn’t create but embraced when his team needed better scalability. He dives into strategic product decisions, explaining why they chose not to include a certain high-security feature for broader user clarity. The conversation also reveals the friendly competition among multiple companies within the ClickHouse ecosystem, underlining how collaboration can drive open-source innovation while maintaining unique revenue strategies.
Altinity's success with ClickHouse demonstrates that the value of open source lies in performance and user experience rather than being free.
The collaborative yet competitive environment among companies in the ClickHouse ecosystem fosters innovation and customization while addressing unique user needs.
Deep dives
The Relationship Between Altinity and ClickHouse
Altinity serves as an enterprise service provider for ClickHouse, an open-source data warehouse originally developed by Yandex. The company was founded in 2017 by Alexander Zaitsev and focuses on providing support and solutions for ClickHouse, which gained popularity due to its speed and efficiency in handling large volumes of data. Altinity has significantly contributed to the ClickHouse community, merging over 563 pull requests and maintaining crucial ecosystem projects, such as a Kubernetes operator tailored for deploying ClickHouse clusters. Their evolution from a consulting service to a full-fledged company showcases their commitment to making ClickHouse user-friendly and widely adopted.
Advantages and Risks of Not Controlling Open Source Software
Altinity faces both advantages and disadvantages due to its lack of control over the ClickHouse project, as it is not a core committer. This dependence creates potential vulnerabilities but also stimulates collaboration from a diverse range of contributors outside ClickHouse Incorporated, ensuring a continuous flow of enhancements to the software. Many improvements, like bloom filter indexes in Parquet, are built collaboratively, benefiting all users. Altinity maintains its own 'Stable Builds' of ClickHouse for clients requiring stable support, which reflects a pragmatic approach to meeting customer needs while navigating the complexities of open-source dependencies.
Navigating the Open Source Ecosystem
The podcast discusses the ecosystem surrounding ClickHouse, highlighting the balance between competition and collaboration among various companies utilizing the same open-source technology. Altinity distinguishes itself by offering deep support and customization options for clients who require extensive assistance in deploying and managing their databases. In comparison, other options like ClickHouse Incorporated provide simpler, less customizable solutions focused on cloud infrastructure. Altinity's emphasis on maintaining an entirely open-source stack while avoiding vendor lock-in serves as a compelling selling point for clients seeking flexibility in data management.
Challenges and Opportunities in the Open Source Landscape
Altinity's biggest challenges stem from the unpredictable nature of open-source business models, especially in achieving profitability. The company has found success in focusing on ClickHouse and exploring its niche in the analytic database market, while simultaneously adapting to emerging trends in the integration of real-time analytics with data lakes. This adaptability is a key factor in maintaining customer engagement and aligning product development with market demands. Consequently, Altinity observes that its long-term success hinges on continuous innovation and close monitoring of industry shifts, ensuring they remain relevant in a rapidly evolving landscape.
This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Robert Hodges, CEO of Altinity. This is a great example of an open source company that is built on top of an open source project, ClickHouse, that they did not create and still do not have direct control over. Altinity has created and maintains other open source projects in the ClickHouse ecosystem as well, but
So many things to unpack with this episode, but a couple I want to call attention to in particular.
The origin story of how Altinity’s founder discovered Clickhouse (he did not create it!). I love how Robert specifies that Alexander Zaitsev, one of the Altinity co-founders, discovered ClickHouse because he wasn’t happy with how the database he was using scaled — and by the way, it had nothing to do with how much the database cost. Great example of an open source project winning because it provided superior value, not because it was/is free.
Making product strategy decisions based on who the ideal user and the ideal customer is. Robert talked about how Altinity didn’t contribute a particular high-security feature back to open source ClickHouse because while it’s something that very security-conscious organizations would want, for an open source users who doesn’t have major security and compliance requirements it would be confusing and create a worse user experience.
Working in friendly competition with the 10 or so other companies that are building around ClickHouse, and how this is one of the unique things about working around open source
How Altinity’s customers tend to value the four freedoms of open source
Are you a leader of an open source company and you’re struggling to prioritize your product roadmap in a way that reinforces your differentiated value… reach out. I help companies figure out the differentiated value of their product and product, where to put the line between the two, and how to use that information to prioritize your roadmap, build a sales narrative and communicate with your market.
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