Why Trainy migrated from Amazon RDS Postgres to ClickHouse Managed Postgres

Summary

Trainy’s Pluto is an open-source experiment tracker that separates analytics metrics in ClickHouse Cloud from relational run metadata in Postgres. Its original metadata store, Amazon RDS Postgres, was too expensive for the volume observed and contributed to slower initial page loads, so Trainy migrated roughly 40–50 GB to ClickHouse Managed Postgres, which uses local NVMe storage and keeps both databases in one account. After migration, initial page loads became 2–3 times faster, while a complex query reported as taking 10–15 minutes previously returned in five seconds; visualization queries over runs with hundreds of thousands of steps typically return in 50–100 milliseconds at the P50. Trainy reports 100% reliable ingestion with zero dropped data points and says the unified stack could support future joins between GPU metrics and run metadata, as well as governed agent access.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Pluto places observability-style metrics in ClickHouse and relational run data, including creation times and hyperparameters, in Postgres.

2. 2

   ClickHouse Managed Postgres runs on local NVMe storage rather than the network-attached storage used by most managed Postgres services, keeping storage next to compute.

3. 3

   ClickHouse query insights give Trainy 80–90% of the way toward identifying whether slow queries originate in application services or query optimization.