ClickHouse + dbt: Building a GitOps workflow at Twilio

To eliminate the infrastructure overhead and high storage and infrastructure costs of its legacy streaming stack, Twilio’s Voice Insights team successfully consolidated its massive real-time telemetry pipeline into ClickHouse. However, database consolidation introduced a critical operational challenge: how to safely manage, test, and orchestrate schema changes and SQL transformations across distributed development teams without risking production stability.

This session presents the practical architectural blueprint of how Twilio solved this by pairing ClickHouse with dbt to establish a modern GitOps developer workflow. By treating database schemas entirely as code, the team engineered a robust pipeline where developers can safely build and test transformations in isolated preview environments and automate validation in CI/CD dramatically accelerating development cycles.