If you want to run ClickHouse at scale, you have to run your own k8s, figure out how to manage persistent storage, figure out how to replicate your data, manage cluster replicated tables, etc. Once you outgrow single instance, things get exponentially more difficult - both for the admins and for the users.
This greatly overstates the difficulty of running ClickHouse as well as the current state of the market.
1. ClickHouse has a good Kubernetes operator written by Altinity that manages most of the basic Kubernetes operations. It's used to operate many thousands of ClickHouse clusters worldwide both self-managed environments as well as multiple SaaS offerings of ClickHouse. (Disclaimer: it's written by my company.)
2. If you don't want the trouble of running ClickHouse there are now multiple cloud vendors in every geographic region offering ClickHouse-as-a-Service. Among other things competition keeps prices reasonable and ensures plenty of choice for users.
There are real differences between Snowflake and ClickHouse but ease of operation is no longer one of them. For example one major difference between Snowflake and ClickHouse from a user perspective is the following: You can develop great Snowflake applications just with a knowledge of SQL whereas for ClickHouse you really have to know how it works inside.
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This greatly overstates the difficulty of running ClickHouse as well as the current state of the market.
1. ClickHouse has a good Kubernetes operator written by Altinity that manages most of the basic Kubernetes operations. It's used to operate many thousands of ClickHouse clusters worldwide both self-managed environments as well as multiple SaaS offerings of ClickHouse. (Disclaimer: it's written by my company.)
2. If you don't want the trouble of running ClickHouse there are now multiple cloud vendors in every geographic region offering ClickHouse-as-a-Service. Among other things competition keeps prices reasonable and ensures plenty of choice for users.
There are real differences between Snowflake and ClickHouse but ease of operation is no longer one of them. For example one major difference between Snowflake and ClickHouse from a user perspective is the following: You can develop great Snowflake applications just with a knowledge of SQL whereas for ClickHouse you really have to know how it works inside.