[zX41ZdbW]

ClickHouse has two modes of operation on S3:

1. S3 as main storage with a write-through cache. 2. S3 as a cold tier in tiered storage.

It works well because the data is organized by a set of immutable parts called MergeTree. These data parts are atomically created, merged, and deleted, but never modified.

S3 does not work well with random access... but neither it's needed.

[ddorian43]

Both BigTable and Spanner use Colossus for storage. Which are for OLTP and random access.