Building a Real-Time Data Pipeline with Apache Kafka and ClickHouse
When your analytics queries go from “how did we do last week?” to “what’s happening right now?”, your data warehouse needs to evolve. Here’s how we built a real-time pipeline handling 500K events/second with sub-second query latency. Architecture Overview ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐ ┌────────────┐ ┌──────────┐ │ Services │────▶│ Kafka │────▶│ ClickHouse │────▶│ Grafana │ │ (protobuf)│ │ (Avro) │ │ (MergeTree)│ │ Dashboards│ └──────────┘ └──────────┘ └────────────┘ └──────────┘ │ ▼ ┌──────────┐ │ Schema │ │ Registry │ └──────────┘ Why ClickHouse Over Traditional OLAP? ClickHouse is a columnar database built for real-time analytics. Unlike Snowflake or BigQuery: ...