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Alex Robinson

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Tutorials

How to run CockroachDB on Kubernetes

Managing resilience, scale, and ease of operations in a containerized world is largely what Kubernetes is all about—and one of the reasons platform adoption has doubled since 2017. And as container orchestration continues to become a dominant DevOps paradigm, the ecosystem has continued to mature with better tools for replication, management, and monitoring of our workloads. And as Kubernetes grows, so does CockroachDB as we’ve recently simplified some of the day 2 operations associated with our distributed database with our Kubernetes Operator. Ultimately, however, our overall goal in the cloud-native community is singular: ease the deployment of stateful workloads on Kubernetes.

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Alex Robinson

November 17, 2021

Kubernetes Part2 ZoeVanDijk-1

Gotchas and solutions running a distributed system across Kubernetes clusters

``` I recently gave a talk at KubeCon North America -- “Experience Report: Running a Distributed System Across Kubernetes Clusters”. Below is a blog based on that talk for those who prefer to read rather than listen. For anyone interested in viewing the talk, it is available here. ``` If you have run Kubernetes clusters recently, you've probably found that it's a nice way to run your distributed applications. It makes it easy to run even pretty complicated applications like a distributed system. And importantly, it's been drastically improving over the years. New features like dynamic volume provisioning, StatefulSets, and multi-zone clusters have made it much easier to run reliable stateful services. Community innovations like Helm charts have been great for people like me who want to make it easy for other people to run an application they develop on Kubernetes. And for end users, the increasing number of managed Kubernetes services these days make it so that you don't have to run your own cluster. However, the situation hasn't really improved if you want your service to span across multiple regions or multiple Kubernetes clusters. There have been early efforts, such as the Ubernetes project, and the recent Federation v2 project is still ongoing, but nothing has yet solved the problem of running a distributed system that spans multiple clusters. It's still a very hard experience that isn't really documented.

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Alex Robinson

December 20, 2018

multi-region-how-by-rebekka-dunlap-1 (1)

applications

Database scaling strategies: A practical approach

In tech, we hear the importance of “scale” all the time. People plan for it, try to work around not having it, and build companies to help others achieve it. But when it comes time to scale something yourself or integrate a scalable solution with your app, it’s difficult to find practical guides to help you understand what it takes. Why’s that? Well, it’s kind of hard. Actually scaling a database beyond a single availability zone takes considerable planning and engineering investment––but that being said, it’s an incredibly powerful tool to delight your users with low latencies and high availability.

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Alex Robinson

February 8, 2018

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System

Using “follow-the-workload” to beat the latency-survivability tradeoff in CockroachDB

Geographically distributed databases like CockroachDB offer a number of benefits including reliability, security, cost-effective deployments, and more. Critics often counter that distributed databases increase latency. What if a database could offer all of the benefits of distribution, but also provide low-latency? With this challenge in mind, we set out to minimize latency in CockroachDB, all the while providing exceptional reliability for mission-critical workloads. We built “follow-the-workload” to be a key feature to improve performance and provide additional control to database administrators (DBAs).

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Alex Robinson

December 5, 2017

cockroachdb geo-partitioning

Product

Using tunable controls for low latency in CockroachDB

Geographically distributed databases like CockroachDB offer a number of benefits including reliability, cost-effective deployments, and more. Critics often counter that distributed databases increase latency. What if a database could offer all of the benefits of distribution, but also provide low latency?

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Alex Robinson

November 30, 2017

Mesosphere-intergration-by-Ana-Hill-1

Engineering

CockroachDB on DC/OS: Resilient and hassle-free operations for global services

CockroachDB makes data easier to manage by providing a strongly-consistent, highly-scalable, SQL interface that you can trust to be there when you need it. We’ve designed it to be a truly cloud-native, distributed SQL database that’s easy to operate in any environment you throw at it. One such computing environment that has grown in popularity over the previous few years is Mesosphere’s DC/OS, a datacenter operating system built on top of Apache Mesos. DC/OS is an orchestration system for deploying and managing distributed applications across a cluster of machines as if they were a single pool of resources. DC/OS has both an open source and an enterprise version that gives you the ability to elastically scale your infrastructure on prem or in the cloud. It provides scheduling, resource allocation, service discovery, automatic recovery from failure, load balancing, and more, all with the goal of making it easier to manage your applications.

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Alex Robinson

September 28, 2017

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