How Kami scaled from 80M to nearly 2B events per week with ClickHouse

Kami, a New Zealand-based edtech company, faced significant growth challenges in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with weekly event volumes increasing by 23 times from 2019 to 2020. Their original Postgres-based data architecture struggled under the load, leading to slow queries and rendering analytics dashboards nearly useless. In response, Kami migrated to ClickHouse, an open-source columnar storage system that enabled efficient compression and lightning-fast queries on massive datasets. The migration allowed for real-time event processing without overwhelming infrastructure, and has since focused on bringing in more contextual data for deeper insights. With their new system, Kami can now scale even further, with plans to move to PeerDB for improved reliability and optimize ingestion processes.