marcklingen

Context: When adding Clickhouse to Langfuse [1] to store all observability data, the migration DX was a big challenge. Some migrations need to copy/reorder data between tables which can take a long time and thus need be performed in the background/async. Many teams run Langfuse self-hosted and reducing downtime of an upgrade is important, thus, we added some custom logic to run these “background migrations” for now [2]. For regular migrations we use golang-migrate, works decently although DX isn’t as good as eg Prisma for Postgres.

(1) Stick with a single Docker container and Postgres. This option is simple to self-host, operate, and iterate on, but it suffers from poor performance at scale, especially for analytical queries that become crucial as the project grows. Additionally, as more features emerged, we needed a queue and benefited from caching and asynchronous processing, which required splitting into a second container and adding Redis. These features would have been blocked when going for this setup.

(2) Switch to a scalable setup with a robust infrastructure that enables us to develop features that interest the majority of our community. We have chosen this path and prioritized templates and Helm charts to simplify self-hosting. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback as we transition to v3. We aim to make this process as easy as possible.