Building a Real-Time Data Pipeline with Apache Kafka and ClickHouse

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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:

Data-Engineering on Neputer Blog

Building a Real-Time Data Pipeline with Apache Kafka and ClickHouse

Architecture Overview

Why ClickHouse Over Traditional OLAP?