Do you remember December 7, 2021? If you work in ops, you might – that’s one of the recent examples of a major public cloud region encountering serious issues, and breaking a large number of popular applications, from Disney+ to Ticketmaster, in the process. The outage was resolved, as they always are. But this, and other incidents like it, lay bare that even though the major public clouds can all offer solid uptime, relying on just one of them can still be costly. Even a short outage once every few years can cost millions when you’re operating at scale. According to a 2022 study from analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and AIOps company BigPanda, the average cost of downtime is $12,900 per minute. For large enterprises, the costs are even higher – often millions of dollars per hour, and that’s before you factor in all of the indirect costs such as reputational damage. That’s just one of the reasons why most companies are moving to or considering multi-cloud deployments.

For the first two years of CockroachDB’s existence, the Windows installation instructions read like this: Install Docker. Get the latest CockroachDB Docker image: docker pull cockroachdb/cockroach The instructions were deceptively short, considering that they amounted to downloading a supported operating system (Linux), booting it in a hypervisor, and running CockroachDB inside of that virtual machine.