Blog
Kubernetes
Case Studies
How to store billions of files with CockroachDB and Kubernetes
Optimal Systems came to CockroachDB with the best kind of problem: they had become too successful. Optimal was founded in 1991 to meet the European Space Agency’s need to archive its satellite photos. Decades of successful growth saw the storage product they built for the ESA evolve and expand to serve clients in more than 30 countries.
Charlie Custer
June 23, 2021
Engineering
Survive region outages with CockroachDB: Because sh*t happens
As we outlined in Deploy a Multi-Region Application in Just 3 Steps, we’ve made major changes to simplify the multi-region configuration in CockroachDB. The new abstractions allow users to think of multi-region databases and tables in three ways:
Arul Ajmani
June 22, 2021
Engineering
How to build logging for a distributed database: Splunk vs. ELK vs. BYO
As an SRE on the CockroachDB Dedicated team, we have the unique challenge of monitoring and managing a fleet of CockroachDB clusters around the globe. Perhaps needless to say, as a distributed database, security is an utmost priority for us. To address some of the needs related to security and monitoring (for example intrusion detection audit logging), we’ve invested in our next generation of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) infrastructure.
Paul Bulkley-Logston
June 16, 2021
Company
EMC and VMware exec Lorenzo Montesi joins Cockroach Labs as CFO
We are thrilled to share that finance and strategy veteran Lorenzo Montesi has joined Cockroach Labs as our Chief Financial Officer. Lorenzo could not have joined our team at a better time, as we continue our rapid growth in the cloud data market. With our $160 million fundraise at a valuation of $2 billion earlier this year, adoption of our evolutionary database CockroachDB is exploding. Lorenzo will drive our financial planning, analysis, and operations, working closely with our leadership team to scale Cockroach Labs globally during this significant growth phase.
Peter Guagenti
June 15, 2021
Product
How they survived a database outage: 3 companies share stories
Imagine this: you work in system architecture for a multibillion-dollar consumer-facing business, and it’s the middle of a busy weekend. Suddenly, your database goes down. Transactions aren’t processing. Customers are angry. Logistical issues are stacking up because inventory and warehouse tracking are down. Customer service reps are swamped, but half of the technical staff are twiddling their thumbs because they can’t do their work without a functional database.
Charlie Custer
June 3, 2021
Product
SIGMOD 2022: Enabling the next generation of multi-region applications with CockroachDB
We are pleased to announce that our second paper, Enabling the Next Generation of Multi-Region Applications with CockroachDB, will appear in the Industry Track of the ACM SIGMOD 2022 conference in Philadelphia, PA (as well as remotely), on June 12-17. This paper is the sequel to our SIGMOD 2020 paper in which we introduced CockroachDB’s geo-distributed capabilities to the world.
Alexander Shraer
May 31, 2021
Product
Control data latency and availability with a few SQL statements
Slow applications kill business. Greg Lindon (in this now archived deck), noted that 100ms in latency lowered Amazon’s sales by 1%. Marissa Mayer pointed out that speed really matters when she explained the results of A/B tests as “500ms of additional load time dropped Google searches by 20%.”
Andy Woods
May 20, 2021
Culture
What parental leave is like at Cockroach Labs
Welcoming a child while working at a tech startup can seem like an overwhelming life change. In a world where everyone is already strapped for time, you’re going to take three months away from your role!? It sounds scary, but at Cockroach Labs, we’re working on ways to make this stressful time easier, and I’m excited to share more about our programs for Roachers who are starting or growing their families. For starters, if you think the technology industry is just startups full of recent college graduates, think again! At Cockroach, our average employee is 36 years old. 30% of our team has children, and we average 2 children per family with more Little Roachers on the way!
Lauren Weber
May 17, 2021
Culture
Updating your engineering interview to make better hiring decisions
For many engineers, thinking about spending countless hours of studying for coding interviews leaves them exhausted before they even get started. At Cockroach Labs, we have open sourced the interview process on Github to create familiarity for candidates and removed resumes and utilized exercise-based interviews to reduce bias. Beginning in mid-2017, we engaged with our engineering team on how we can make our engineering interview process less intimidating and more fair, resulting in better hiring decisions.
Lindsay Grenawalt
May 17, 2021