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The Ingestion Proxy Pattern
TL;DR
The ingestion proxy pattern introduces a buffer layer between your applications and ClickHouse. This managed infrastructure component handles write scaling, batching, backpressure, failover, and retries, abstracting away the complexity of direct ClickHouse ingestion.
ClickHouse was built for big, infrequent inserts, not streaming. The ingestion proxy pattern solves this by providing a managed piece of infrastructure that:
- Buffers incoming data into optimized parts
- Handles backpressure automatically
- Manages failover and retries with deduplication
- Routes to healthy replicas based on cluster health
- Provides observability into ingestion metrics
The ingestion proxy pattern abstracts away ClickHouse's ingestion complexity. Instead of managing hundreds of settings, you send data to an endpoint and let the proxy handle the rest.