(Mux co-founder here) The Postgres system described as the predecessor to Clickhouse here actually was cstore_fdw with a pretty heavily customized (and outdated ) CitusDB. CitusDB is a great system for sharding and distributing postgres, but we found that the compression and query performance for this specific analytics use case was much better served by Clickhouse.
The only place Citus is mentioned in the post is in the title of a chart. Might be worth updating to include this, would also clarify note #3:
"ClickHouse is still faster than the sharded Postgres setup at retrieving a single row, despite being column-oriented and using sparse indices. I'll describe how we optimized this query in a moment."
To be transparent, we included Citus in original versions of the post, but decided to take it out because it didn't feel like it was a fair representation of Citus™. As Adam mentioned, what we were using was heavily customized and based on a pretty outdated fork by the time we transitioned.
This should be clarified in the post, otherwise you lead the reader to believe you're representing stock Postgres performance instead of the performance of a forked Citus. This is important information for an informed reader.
If you are open to using an (awesome) vendor for this kind of thing, I would highly recommend taking a look at Backplane (https://www.backplane.io/). It's as simple as running a sidecar Backplane agent container along side any container that you want to route http traffic to and then shape the traffic via their API (it becomes your load balancer as well). They automatically provision Lets Encrypt certificates for your endpoints as well, so you don't have to worry about any of that. We have been using it at Mux in production for months and have been very happy with the results. Backplane also has some other nice built in features like blue/green deploys and built in OAuth support that are really nice to have out of the box.
That WhatsApp vs Telegram user comparison is interesting... nearly everyone in my social group uses Telegram, I don't think I've ever even installed WhatsApp. I know WhatsApp has significantly more users worldwide, but for whatever reason my tribe has chosen Telegram.
I tried the consumer version while wearing glasses a few weeks ago. No lenses were changed out and the device just sat over top of the glasses, it was fairly comfortable but I only spent less than 5 mins with it on.
But seriously, if this actually comes to pass, HEVC is dead in the water. No matter how terrific the gains may be, usage terms this egregious will drive a lot of adoption for Daala or VP9's successor.
