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Driven by a new breed of fintech applications, financial services organizations look to the cloud for infrastructure that is always-on, resilient, and able to support the real-time processing of transactions. In this post, we investigate how these organizations can deliver peak performance while ensuring compliance with local data protection and privacy laws. As Facebook and Google, and new-age fintech apps like Betterment and Robinhood, have driven consumers to expect feature-rich applications, every business needs to be concerned with performance. While this remains a top priority for financial services organizations, another component unique to the banking industry needs to be top of mind – keeping latency low. Another significant benefit of cloud-native applications for banks is that they can support very high volumes of transactions with low latency.

Jessica Edwards

March 26, 2021

Imagine you show up at your favorite cafe and its credit card terminal is down. What happens? Most likely, you don’t have any cash on you. Instead, you go to the next cafe and order from them instead. We never want this to happen to one of our customers, so that’s why we chose to build our infrastructure on CockroachDB. At Aurora Payments, we make sure that small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) get paid quickly and with low fees. We integrate with their point of sale (POS) technology and business management software. We learn all the nuances of their business so that we can process and deliver payments exactly the way our customers need them. We know that all of our effort to deliver exceptional payment solutions would be meaningless if we didn’t have a database that is always on - and always available.

During my first week at Cockroach Labs, our company held its annual Roacherness Awards, a ceremony to recognize and celebrate Roachers who embody our values. I was pleasantly surprised when my colleague Chelsea received an award for our value ‘Establishing Balance,’ celebrating the boundaries she sets between her work and home life through using benefits like our flexible Paid Time off policy to explore the world. This being my second job out of college, I was shocked. My experience post-college was one in which companies asked me to dive into my work with cult-like abandon, to define myself by the goals of the company first, and to let who I am come second.

The current mentorship model is broken. It requires you to have the privilege of belonging to an established network (like a renowned university) or ‘cold call’ potential mentors on a platform like LinkedIn. Even after you find a mentor, it’s difficult to sustain a mentor-mentee connection. This is the challenge a group of students from Lassonde School of Engineering at York University set out to resolve through their Hack the North 2020++ app: mntr.tech

Amruta Ranade

March 19, 2021

Seven years ago, Spencer Kimball made the first commit to the CockroachDB — an open source project he had started with Ben Darnell and Peter Mattis:  Over the years, the project grew in popularity and so did the number of contributors. In 2015, Spencer, Ben, and Peter cofounded a for-profit company around the project — Cockroach Labs. As a for-profit business, we consider it our responsibility to financially support the open source developers and maintainers who help us build a healthy ecosystem of tools and libraries that work with CockroachDB. Cockroach Labs proudly sponsors the following maintainers who help us make CockroachDB the most evolved database on the planet (presented in reverse alphabetical order to liven things up).

Amruta Ranade

March 18, 2021

Many databases -- including Amazon Aurora and CockroachDB -- claim to be "global." While there is no official definition of the term "global database", it deserves to be unpacked. For those who prefer to watch or listen, we explore Aurora's architecture in depth during this webinar: "CockroachDB vs Amazon Aurora: Battle of the Cloud Databases". ### What is a global database? A global database promises global capabilities. At a bare minimum, it should satisfy these three requirements:

Jim Walker

March 17, 2021

Batch data sucks — it’s slow, manual, cumbersome, and often stale. We know because we’ve dealt with these problems ourselves. Any business needs to track metrics, from customer activity to the internal workings of the company. But how can we keep those metrics up to date to extract maximum business value? Here at Cockroach Labs we build CockroachDB, a distributed database meant to survive everything and thrive everywhere. CockroachDB is primarily optimized for transactional- “OLTP”- data, and sometimes it is advantageous to stream that data to an analytical warehouse to run frequent, large queries. That’s what we do with our “telemetry data” — the data we collect internally on product usage.

Remember when people’s vacuum cleaners and doorbells stopped working because a region of AWS went down? That won’t happen to anyone using our smart home products. Levven had been in the electronics manufacturing industry for decades before “smart technology” paved the way for “smart homes”. When that happened we saw an opportunity to help make homes more affordable by designing and manufacturing smart home controls that reduce build costs. By eliminating the wire between the wall switch and the light we can offer consumers more eco-friendly home construction saving precious resources. At Levven we added smart home controls manufacturing 5 years ago - but our cloud connectivity is new. Levven’s goal is to make homes more affordable to build, purchase, and operate for the masses with smart controls. In order to do that we need to build scale-out, low maintenance infrastructure that keeps the cost to the end user low, while also guaranteeing that our smart home controls will always work. To help us address this IoT challenge we chose CockroachDB’s managed service offering: CockroachDB Dedicated. In this blog we’ll explain how we’ve built IoT application architecture that keeps smart devices available at all times.

G’day! I’m Oliver, a Member of Technical Staff here at Cockroach Labs. After spending the better part of 5 years in the United States, I decided to come back home to Sydney, Australia. With my homecoming, I’m happy to announce that Cockroach Labs is hiring people to work with us from Sydney, Australia! If you’re curious about me, my journey, and why I’m at Cockroach, read on. Of course, if the news of an opening sounds good, you can jump straight to the job openings we have in Sydney.