DoubleCloud

DoubleCloud was an integrated platform designed to empower engineering teams to build and manage data analytics infrastructure efficiently, often within a single day. It provided a suite of fully managed open-source services, including ClickHouse, Kafka, and Airflow, deployable on major cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud. The platform aimed to abstract away the complexities of infrastructure maintenance, allowing developers to focus on building products. It is important to note that DoubleCloud has ceased its operations, and this information is for archival purposes.

How to use DoubleCloud

The process of getting started with DoubleCloud was designed to be straightforward and rapid:

1. Sign Up & Get Credits: Users could sign up for an account and typically received free credits (e.g., $300) to explore the platform's capabilities.
2. Provision Resources: In the management console, users would select their preferred cloud provider (AWS or GCP), a region, and configure the necessary resources for their cluster (e.g., ClickHouse or Kafka).
3. Transfer Data: The platform included a no-code ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) tool called Data Transfer, which allowed for real-time data syncing from various sources into the provisioned services like ClickHouse.
4. Analyze and Visualize: Once the data was in place, users could leverage the high-speed query capabilities of ClickHouse via a web-based SQL IDE or connect the managed visualization service to build real-time charts and dashboards.

Core Features of DoubleCloud

• Managed Open-Source Services: Provided managed, production-ready clusters of leading open-source technologies, including ClickHouse for real-time analytics, Kafka for data streaming, and Airflow for workflow orchestration.
• No-Code Data Integration: A serverless ELT tool for fast, real-time data synchronization between different systems, seamlessly integrated with the platform's services.
• Real-Time Visualization: A managed business intelligence (BI) tool that enabled users to create interactive charts and dashboards directly from their data sources in real-time.
• Fully Managed Operations: The platform handled all routine maintenance tasks such as OS and software updates, monitoring, logging, backups, recovery, auto-scaling, and high availability.
• Exceptional Performance: Built around ClickHouse, the platform offered extremely fast query performance, capable of processing billions of rows in milliseconds. Its data transfer service was also optimized for high speed.
• Developer-Centric Tools: Supported automated deployment via Terraform and a comprehensive API, metrics export to Prometheus, a web-based SQL IDE, and built-in support for dbt (data build tool).
• Robust Security & Compliance: Ensured data security with enforced TLS 1.2+ encryption, dedicated VMs, and compliance with major standards like ISO 27001, SOC 2, and GDPR.

Use Cases for DoubleCloud

DoubleCloud was versatile and catered to various data-intensive applications:

• Real-Time Analytics: Companies like LSports used DoubleCloud to improve query speeds by 180x for real-time sports data analytics.
• Logging & Metrics: Neon utilized the platform to enhance the granularity of resource consumption metrics, enabling a new pricing model based on usage.
• End-User Facing Analytics: Yango Tech was able to launch partner-facing analytics dashboards within a week, demonstrating the platform's speed of implementation.
• Application Monitoring: Honeybadger migrated from Elasticsearch to DoubleCloud's managed ClickHouse to boost performance for their health app monitoring service.

Advantages of DoubleCloud

The platform offered several key advantages:

• Speed of Deployment: Enabled teams to set up a complete analytics infrastructure in a fraction of the time it would take manually.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Featured a pay-as-you-go model, S3 hybrid storage to reduce costs by up to 5x, and included many services like backups and data traffic for free.
• Reduced Operational Overhead: By managing all maintenance, it freed up engineering resources to focus on core business logic and product development.
• High Performance: Leveraged best-in-class open-source technologies like ClickHouse to deliver industry-leading speed for data processing and analytics.
• Integrated Ecosystem: Provided an all-in-one solution, from data storage and transfer to orchestration and visualization, ensuring seamless interoperability.

Pricing and Plans

DoubleCloud's pricing was structured to be transparent and flexible:

• Pay-As-You-Go: Users were billed based on their actual resource consumption with no hidden costs.
• Free Trial: New users were offered $300 in free credits to test the platform.
• Free Services: Several features were offered at no extra charge, including the data visualization tool, automatic backups, and ingress/egress traffic.
• Support Tiers: Three levels of support were available: Developer (Free, for non-production environments), Business (for standard production workloads), and Premium (for critical workloads requiring 24/7 support).

Committed use discounts were also available for long-term contracts.