Blog
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
What is operational resilience and how to achieve it
Major cloud platform outages used to be rare events. As the amount of global data increases exponentially, however (90% of the world’s data was generated in the last two years alone!) significant outages are becoming increasingly common. The potential user impact of cloud service provider (CSP) outages hits both deep and wide. For example, GCP’s europe-west9 full-region outage in April 2023 and AWS’s us-east-1 outage in June 2023 each temporarily disrupted operations for the businesses, schools, hospitals, and even government agencies relying on their services in those regions. And these are but two among many recent CSP downtime events: Data shows a steady rise in total observed global network outages in 2023 so far. The growing frequency of outages like these keeps the world’s government officials up at night. One of their deepest concerns is for the potentially catastrophic impact a major CSP failure could have on financial institutions — and the very real-world damage this could do to their economies. Concern is increasingly turning to action as different countries propose technical requirements aimed at ensuring operational resilience for their financial institutions (as well as other critical services like utilities, transportation, and healthcare). Technical requirements that are already becoming formal government regulations in some countries, with many more on the horizon. What does this mean for all organizations right now, and what can they do to prepare?
Michelle Gienow
August 24, 2023
Product
CockroachDB Serverless: Free. Seriously.
[This post was originally published in October 2022. It has been updated to reflect current product offerings.] Traditionally, one of the stickiest decisions developers need to make when creating a database is choosing how many servers to use based on expected application traffic. Guess too low and your db could fall over under load, causing an outage. Guess too high, you pay for servers that just sit idle most of the time. Spiky loads? Uh oh, gotta overprovision to make sure those surges get handled even if it means wasted capacity 90%+ of the time.
Michelle Gienow
August 18, 2023
Product
What is an inverted index, and why should you care?
Indexes can have a significant impact on database performance. Let’s take a look at one type that’s especially important for searching text: the inverted index.
Charlie Custer
August 17, 2023
System
Why Multi-Region Application Architecture Matters
In my experience as a software engineer (and generally as a human, come to think of it), it seems to be universally easier to go from 2 to 3 of something, than it is to go from 1 to 2. For example, if your application already supports 2 languages, adding a 3rd is simple; whereas, if your application only supports 1 language, you need to build support for internationalization, before you can add the 2nd. The same holds true for application architecture; adding a 3rd region to an application that’s already distributed and supports multiple regions is much easier than making a single region application distributed (can run across multiple machines) and then multi-region (region/locality awareness).
Rob Reid
August 14, 2023
How to ensure your application can survive a World Cup shoot out
Everyone loves a dramatic finish. And with past winners the United States now eliminated from the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, some drama is guaranteed. Will England’s women bring it home for the first time ever? Will the Netherlands avenge their 2019 finals loss? Will a nation that has never made the finals – perhaps Australia, playing at home for this tournament, or Jamaica in their first-ever survival round – grab a surprise win?
Charlie Custer
August 7, 2023
applications
For better performance, your database should work like a CDN
Dealing with distributed database performance issues? Let’s talk about CDNs. Even though they’re at different levels of your tech stack, distributed databases and content delivery networks often share a similar goal: improving the availability and speed between your service and your user.
Sean Loiselle
August 4, 2023
System
Top 5 questions to ask when migrating databases
Migrating to a new database is an exciting and daunting challenge. There is tremendous upside for applications and operations at the end of the migration process, but all too often the migration takes longer than expected or is left in a partially complete state. Many technical challenges are well solved but stakeholders have different goals that complicate completing the migration successfully and on time. You can avoid common pitfalls and get your new database completely serving production data on a reliable timeline by asking and answering the following five questions:
Dustin Cote
August 3, 2023
Product
What is a data pipeline, and how do you build one?
A data pipeline is a piece of software that ingests data from one or more sources, and moves that data to one or more destinations. Often, the data is transformed as part of this process to ensure that it meets the requirements of the system or systems it is being sent to.
Charlie Custer
August 2, 2023