Cassie is a Staff Product Marketing Manager at Cockroach Labs. Her focus is on vertical marketing and telling customer stories. She's been in the database world for the past 7 years and previously worked in communications for cybersecurity companies. In her free time, you can find her at the beach, sipping wine, or skiing down a mountain.
Design
Multi-cloud architecture: Three real-world examples from fintech
According to Gartner, by 2025 over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms. It makes sense – building with cloud-native technologies can shorten development cycles and increase operational efficiency. Not only do organizations want to build on a cloud-native foundation, but they also want to have the ability to move applications and data from one cloud computing environment (public and/or private) to another with minimal disruption – also known as cloud portability. This capability helps organizations increase resilience and avoid the risks associated with cloud concentration.
Cassie McAllister
September 13, 2023
Product
Idempotency’s role in financial services (with examples)
When it comes to payment and billing applications, not only is availability crucial, but development teams need to build idempotency into their system to guarantee data correctness.
Cassie McAllister
August 30, 2023
Product
Not if, but when: The case for mainframe modernization
The first idea for a mainframe was developed by a Harvard researcher who took the concept to IBM in the 1930s. After a decade or so of development, the 5 ton machine – that filled an entire room and would cost around $3M today to build – was ready to use in 1943. Industries such as banking, retail, insurance, utilities, healthcare, and government still rely on their mainframes to handle their most sensitive, large-scale transactional data. Mainframes excel when it comes to security and reliability which is why many organizations trust them with their mission-critical workloads.
Cassie McAllister
July 6, 2023
Community
How 5 fintech companies build for scale, availability, and consistency
Building a payment processing system is hard and managing people’s money and personal data comes with a lot of risk. The fintech industry is extremely competitive and it’s no longer acceptable to make tradeoffs when building your infrastructure. For most organizations, a payment system is a tier 0 service essential for operations. Downtime is a huge liability. Scaling can be a difficult technical challenge. And what about guaranteeing consistent transactions at scale?
Cassie McAllister
June 8, 2023
Product
How Netflix engineers choose their tech stack
Large enterprises with hundreds of developers building thousands of applications and services have a suite of database options to choose from. They also typically have a full team dedicated to maintaining these offerings. The saying “use the best tool for the job” is why they offer so many options, since different workloads have different requirements. Over the past few years, the “best tools” have changed because of the increasing demand on infrastructure generated by business-critical, high-volume, workloads.
Cassie McAllister
May 18, 2023
applications
Why dating app Doubble matched with CockroachDB
It’s estimated that there’s over 380 million people across the globe that are active on online dating apps – and that number is only growing. In fact, the market for online dating services is projected to reach 9.2 billion USD by 2025. That’s a lot of swiping!
Cassie McAllister
April 16, 2023
Design
Salto Systems: Highly available access management technology
When you tap a hotel keycard on your door handle and hear the satisfying buzz and click of a deadbolt electronically unlocking you’ve likely just used a SALTO Systems product. SALTO is a leader in cloud-based access management technology. They manufacture advanced, flexible, and secure wireless electronic access control technology. SALTO’s products are available in over 40 countries and they have over 40M daily active users accessing over 5M equipped devices. They are leading the movement to replace mechanical keys with digital keys. As part of their strategy for leading this movement they are building flexible infrastructure with CockroachDB.
Cassie McAllister
March 1, 2023
System
Flexible and correct Identity Access Management
One mistake that should never be made is to assume permissions and identity access are easy. If you plan on just throwing some rows in the database and then making an authorization decision based on the existence (or nonexistence) of a row… then you might not be “secure”. And further, once you are successful, you should also start to consider a scalable and more accurate approach.
Cassie McAllister
January 26, 2023
applications
How Hard Rock Digital built a highly available and compliant sports betting app
In 2020, Hard Rock International (HRI) and Seminole Gaming (SGA) launched Hard Rock Digital and tasked that organization with developing an application for sports betting. Hard Rock Digital has the ability to leverage data from HRI and SGA’s combined database of more than 130 million customers and their ~250 land-based venue (across 76 countries); to build the application.
Cassie McAllister
December 21, 2022