How Canva achieved 10x faster search and 70% lower costs with ClickHouse

Canva has significantly enhanced its real-time observability infrastructure by leveraging ClickHouse, achieving a 14x compression ratio and reducing infrastructure costs by around 70%. By redesigning data ingestion and storage, Canva now processes nearly 3 million spans and logs per second, which is critical given their 240 million monthly active users. This transformation has led to a 10x performance improvement in trace search times, reducing them from 30 seconds to 2.5 seconds. The journey involved moving tracing workloads to ClickHouse, optimizing ingestion, and refining schema design to support scalable and efficient data handling. For trace searches, Canva implemented a materialized-view lookup table and client-side optimizations to enhance speed, while their logging infrastructure benefited from async inserts for improved performance. The team also addressed the developer experience by building a custom query gateway and logging platform, ensuring a familiar and efficient user experience. This overhaul has resulted in a leaner and faster observability platform, with Canva's traces and logs running on ClickHouse with fewer resources than their previous system required.

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