Deploying ClickHouse using Altinity.Cloud

🌇 Sunset Kubernetes deployments
This page covers our PostHog Kubernetes deployment, which we sunset and no longer support. We will continue to provide security updates for Kubernetes deployments until at least May 31, 2024.
For existing customers
We highly recommend migrating to PostHog Cloud (US or EU). Take a look at this guide for more information on the migration process.
Looking to continue self-hosting?
We still maintain our Open-source Docker Compose deployment. Instructions for deploying can be found here.

This document outlines how to deploy PostHog using Altinity Cloud ClickHouse clusters.

Prerequisites

Altinity.Cloud ClickHouse cluster:
- Minimum ClickHouse version: 21.8.13
- Single shard and no data replication
- No dashes (-) in cluster name
PostHog helm chart version >= 16.1.1
PostHog version >= 1.33.0

Deployment instructions

PostHog uses Kafka to send data from the app to ClickHouse. For that reason, Kafka needs to be accessible to ClickHouse during deployment.

Deploying using external Kafka

YAML

env:
    - name: CLICKHOUSE_DISABLE_EXTERNAL_SCHEMAS
      value: '1'

kafka:
    enabled: false

externalKafka:
    brokers:
        - 'broker-1.posthog.kafka.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:9094'
        - 'broker-2.posthog.kafka.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:9094'
        - 'broker-3.posthog.kafka.us-east-1.amazonaws.com:9094'

clickhouse:
    enabled: false

externalClickhouse:
    host: 'somecluster.demo.altinity.cloud'
    user: 'admin'
    password: 'password'
    cluster: 'clustername'
    secure: true

Read more about how to configure external Kafka in the chart in our deployment documentation.

Using internal Kafka

To deploy using a version of Kafka managed by the PostHog Helm chart, follow these three steps:

Deploy your Helm chart initially with the following values.yaml:

YAML

kafka:
    enabled: true
    externalAccess:
        enabled: true
        service:
            type: LoadBalancer
            ports:
                external: 9094
        autoDiscovery:
            enabled: true
    serviceAccount:
        create: true
    rbac:
        create: true

clickhouse:
    enabled: false

redis:
    enabled: false

postgresql:
    enabled: false

pgbouncer:
    enabled: false

plugins:
    enabled: false

worker:
    enabled: false

web:
    enabled: false

events:
    enabled: false

migrate:
    enabled: false

Get the external Kafka IP via kubectl get svc -n posthog | grep kafka-0-external
Deploy PostHog using helm with new values.yaml (fill in placeholder values)

YAML

env:
    - name: KAFKA_URL_FOR_CLICKHOUSE
      value: 'kafka://KAFKA_IP:9094'
    - name: CLICKHOUSE_DISABLE_EXTERNAL_SCHEMAS
      value: '1'

clickhouse:
    enabled: false

externalClickhouse:
    host: 'somecluster.demo.altinity.cloud'
    user: 'admin'
    password: 'password'
    cluster: 'clustername'
    secure: true

kafka:
    enabled: true
    externalAccess:
        enabled: true
        service:
            type: LoadBalancer
            ports:
                external: 9094
        autoDiscovery:
            enabled: true
    serviceAccount:
        create: true
    rbac:
        create: true

Prerequisites

Deployment instructions

Deploying using external Kafka

Using internal Kafka

Questions?

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