As we head into the new year, it’s the perfect time to look back on what was a big year for Cockroach Labs. 2024 has been memorable for us, in so many ways. Our company grew to over 500 employees; we moved both our Bangalore and Austin offices to larger spaces to accommodate our growth; we took our annual customer conference, RoachFest, global for the first time. We also celebrated the 50th episode of our podcast, Big Ideas in App Architecture, which has featured tech leaders from Cameo, Estée Lauder, DoorDash, Confluent, and more.
On the product side, the innovations kept coming. We introduced many under-the-cover performance improvements, like cost-based optimization and generic query plans, along with pgvector-compatible support for vector data types and search. On the cloud side of the product, we introduced our Standard plan to help organizations who need more from a serverless offering, but do not yet need global scale right now. To simplify migrations we expanded our MOLT (Migrate Off Legacy Technology) tools by providing MOLT Fetch for both PostgreSQL and MySQL. Finally, to deliver alternative two data-center disaster recovery and resilience architectures, we delivered physical cluster replication (PCR) and logical data replication (LDR) for our self-hosted customers.
This fall, we launched our first-ever State of Resilience Report, which revealed the true cost of downtime across industries. In the wake of global outages like CrowdStrike, which impacted so many businesses and people during their everyday lives, we are excited to continue building CockroachDB, an enterprise-ready, distributed SQL solution that can eliminate downtime, simplify operations, and enable seamless customer experiences for business-critical applications around the world.
None of this – and the highlights to follow – would have been possible without the support of our partners and customers, who we are proud to collaborate with. We likewise cap off 2024 with a note of gratitude for all of our users and employees worldwide. Cheers to a wonderful 2024, and we look forward to a successful 2025 together!
Engineering-led excellence: The new Cloud Platform, migrations, PostgreSQL compatibility, and AI
Databases are a key part of any organization’s infrastructure, because we need data for everything: understanding the customer experience, measuring the popularity of products or services, determining whether a product or service is functioning properly, etc. We understand the trust that all of our customers place in us, and we take that trust seriously: Cockroach Labs is relentlessly dedicated to product excellence, and that commitment has been reflected in our product releases throughout 2024.
One of our biggest updates was to our fully managed, enterprise database platform. At RoachFest NYC, we announced the new Standard Plan for the CockroachDB Cloud Platform. In addition to our long-standing Basic (formerly Serverless) and Advanced (formerly Dedicated) tiers, our Standard plan delivers the perfect balance of cost efficiency, scalability, and security, completing our vision for an all-encompassing enterprise-grade cloud platform. This solution was crafted with our customers in mind, to support a wide variety of workloads, use-cases and applications at any phase of the cloud journey.
We’re well aware that data migration can be complex, frustrating, and unintuitive, and we were determined to solve these pain points and make it easier for those that have chosen to modernize their data infrastructure with CockroachDB. That’s why 2024 saw an expansion of our our MOLT (Migrate Off Legacy Technology) tools, a powerful suite of solutions that aid our customers in moving off legacy systems:
MOLT Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) supports database schema conversion
MOLT Fetch moves data through bulk ingestion and continuously streaming replication
MOLT Verify validates data
We built these tools with your challenges in mind, which is why we’ve included features like auto schema creation, continuation tokens, exception logs, and more.
2024 is the year that Cockroach Labs doubled down on PostgreSQL compatibility. We have prioritized PostgreSQL compatibility historically, to make it easier for users to migrate existing applications built on PostgreSQL, without making substantial changes to application code. By creating a familiar PostgreSQL interface, this also allows developers to adapt to CockroachDB more easily. We expanded on that mindset this year with a number of new enhancements, including support of stored procedures and triggers.
AI is important to every enterprise’s plans, and in 2024, CockroachDB introduced vector search capabilities compatible with PostgreSQL’s pgvector extension. This feature allows users to store and perform basic vector searches within CockroachDB, enhancing functionalities such as semantic search, recommendation systems, and natural language processing. These capabilities are crucial for AI-driven applications, including Large Language Models (LLMs). The integration of vector search establishes CockroachDB as a resilient and scalable database solution for AI/ML workloads, capable of handling large-scale data processing and storage requirements seamlessly.
Celebrating You Around the World
This year, our annual customer conference, RoachFest, expanded globally for the first time with events in Menlo Park, London, and New York, reflecting the growing adoption of distributed SQL. The NYC conference featured a keynote address from our co-founder and CEO, Spencer Kimball, who highlighted the importance of resilient architectures in today's data landscape, while other Roachers shared key product announcements.
Attendees had the opportunity to hear from industry leaders like Netflix, Global Payments, and Microsoft, who shared their success stories of leveraging CockroachDB to build scalable and resilient applications. These presentations not only showcased the innovative use cases of our customers, and fostered valuable collaboration and knowledge sharing among data leaders worldwide.
Thank you to all of the incredible presenters who took the time to hit the RoachFest stage! We are so grateful for your time and insights as you shared how you managed database migrations, modernized data infrastructure, and scaled resilient global businesses. We are proud to support our customers in their journey towards modern, cloud-native database solutions and look forward to continuing this momentum in the coming years.
You can experience all of our RoachFest presentations at our RoachFest Hub.
Expanding Partnerships with AWS, Google Cloud, and more
Cockroach Labs is always building substantial partnerships with key innovators, who continue to lead advancements in data modernization and generative AI. 2024 was a tremendous year, and we are proud to collaborate with our incredible partners, who have entrusted us as stewards of modern data architecture.
This year, Cockroach Labs not only earned our AWS Financial Services Competency Status, we also were named finalists for AWS’ Industry Partner of the Year – Travel and Hospitality, North America, and launched our pay-as-you-go offering on AWS Marketplace, streamlining and simplifying the billing process for users. Additionally, we recently announced our new Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS.
The collaboration builds on Cockroach Labs' track record of enabling enterprises to modernize their infrastructure, ensuring high availability, strong consistency, and multi-region scalability. Our multifaceted AWS partnership replicates these successes at scale, driving substantial cloud consumption and helping enterprises realize the benefits of cloud-native and GenAI technologies.
This year we also partnered with mLogica to reduce risks, costs, complexity, and time-to-value of modernizing from mainframe and monolithic legacy database systems. The native integration of CockroachDB into mLogica's GenAI-powered automation solutions accelerates enterprise migrations to a modern PostgreSQL-compatible distributed database, with portability across the cloud, multi-cloud, and on-premises.
Beyond our work with AWS, we appreciate our longstanding partnerships with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Our expansive partner ecosystem is a constant source of inspiration for delivering unparalleled customer experiences and outcomes.
We are especially thankful to Gbenga Ige, Global Leader for Digital Native Strategy, Microsoft, for giving a partner keynote presentation at our final installment of RoachFest 2024, in New York City. Ige focused on how changes in technology can result in innovative use-cases, and ultimately catalyze the rise of new businesses, for example, we’ve seen the rise of music streaming, GPS, high-res camera phones, and generative AI. This year, we’ve also loved partnering with joint customers, such as City Storage Systems, which also presented at RoachFest with Lulu Chen, Azure Infrastructure Leader, Software & Digital Platforms, Microsoft. The collaborative fireside chat focused on how City Storage Systems leveraged Microsoft Azure and CockroachDB to assure zero downtime for their business-critical applications that required flexible deployment configurations. City Storage Systems – a startup founded by Uber’s Travis Kalanick – is on a mission to reinvent the businesses of food. In 2019 the team started to build their infrastructure on CockroachDB and now runs a fleet of clusters that are designed to tolerate a region-wide outage.
In addition, given our close collaboration with Google Cloud, we launched a new pay-as-you-go offering for CockroachDB Cloud on Google Cloud Marketplace. This new offering makes it easier than ever for teams to procure CockroachDB on Google Cloud while managing costs through their existing Google Cloud billing account. With pay-as-you-go billing, customers can start small and scale as needed, pay only for what they use, and manage all their Google Cloud and CockroachDB Cloud costs in one place. This new offering reflects our continued commitment to making CockroachDB more accessible while delivering the same highly available, scalable, and resilient database that companies can rely on to run business-critical applications.
Finally, earlier this year, we announced our strategic collaboration with PwC UK. This partnership aims to help financial institutions modernize their data infrastructure and solving related challenges. By leveraging PwC UK's expertise in regulatory compliance and CockroachDB's advanced distributed SQL database technology, the collaboration provides comprehensive solutions that address business, regulatory, and technological challenges. This includes ensuring data sovereignty compliance, enhancing operational resilience through multi-region and multi-cloud capabilities, and improving cost efficiency and business agility by transitioning from legacy systems to modern cloud architectures.
As a trusted partner for those building modern data architectures, we look forward to reaching even more users in 2025, and supporting their goals with the security, scalability, and resilience of CockroachDB.
2025: The New Normal of Operational Resilience
With unprecedented tech outages disrupting people and businesses throughout 2024, we remained focused on enhancing operational resilience. In an effort to contribute to industry awareness, we released the State of Resilience Report, which polled over 1,000 senior technology leaders on the resilience strategies, priorities, and vulnerabilities facing enterprises today. Key findings include:
86% of executives believe every minute of unplanned downtime risks losing customers
100% of technology executives reported outages in the past year, all resulting in financial losses
95% of executives acknowledged at least one known operational weakness that leaves their organization exposed to downtime
As highlighted by our CEO, Spencer Kimball’s RoachFest keynote speech, the benefits of distributed SQL have continued to shine over time: global scalability and flexibility for data leaders building highly resilient applications. Today, modern users expect not only zero downtime, but also low latency, and always-on experiences. Organizations must accomplish their goals while navigating ever-larger operational big data, regulatory requirements, and AI-driven applications.
Our commitment to deep partnerships with customers was underscored, ensuring that solutions are tailored to their specific needs, thereby enhancing resilience and scalability, while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).
At Cockroach Labs, we’re inspired daily by our customers’ success stories, which show the critical role of operational resilience in modern data architectures. As we wrap up 2024 and look to 2025, we cannot wait to share our next innovations and continue supporting your business-critical applications. Thank you for trusting us with your work and your missions. Here’s to another year of resilience.
