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Since 2017, Cockroach Labs has run thousands of benchmark tests across dozens of machine types with the goal of better understanding performance across cloud providers. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in our experiments, it’s this: benchmarking the clouds is a continuous process. Since results fluctuate as the clouds adopt new hardware, it’s important to regularly re-evaluate your configuration (and cloud vendor).

Andy Woods

December 11, 2019

This year, as every year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday stressed e-commerce systems to their breaking points. Major companies like H&M, Nordstrom Rack, and other retailers experienced the kinds of costly outages that keep SREs up at night. Multi-cloud infrastructure is sometimes offered as a panacea to these kinds of outages. But multi-cloud deployments are not a band-aid. In fact, they often introduce new complexities into the system that need to be sniffed out. But sniffing out bugs in multi-cloud environments is, by nature, complicated. Ana Medina, a chaos engineer from Gremlin, spoke at ESCAPE/19 about how to do it, including a detailed list of the kinds of errors to search for and checklists of questions to ask.

Dan Kelly

December 9, 2019

This article was originally posted on the personal blog of the Peewee ORM founder, Charles Leifer. Peewee is a simple and small Python ORM. It has few (but expressive) concepts, making it easy to learn and intuitive to use. And as of Peewee's most recent release (3.13.0), it supports CockroachDB!

At Cockroach Labs, we're focused on making data easy for our customers. CockroachDB is designed as a vendor-agnostic, cloud-native database for transactional workloads. We offer a number of benefits over traditional relational databases including serializable isolation, online schema changes, and high availability fault-tolerance. Today, we want to demonstrate another CockroachDB differentiator: multi-region support for global scale. In this blog post, we introduce Follower reads, a key feature for supporting multi-region reads with low latency when your use case can accept stale data.

For many people, interactions in the workplace and connections between coworkers are deeply important to overall wellbeing. We learned in the early days of Cockroach Labs that expressing gratitude and praise for the good work of our peers was deeply important to our culture, and that there existed a desire to acknowledge and appreciate each other publicly. This developed into what we call “peer acks”, short for peer acknowledgments, a forum for celebrating the good work of our peers.

Jessica Edwards

November 27, 2019

At Cockroach Labs, we write quite a bit about consensus algorithms. They are a critical component of CockroachDB and we rely on them in the lower layers of our transactional, scalable, distributed key-value store. In fact, large clusters can contain tens of thousands of consensus groups because in CockroachDB, every Range (similar to a shard) is an independent consensus group. Under the hood, we run a large number of instances of Raft (a consensus algorithm), which has come with interesting engineering challenges. This post dives into one that we’ve tackled recently: adding support for atomic replication changes (“Joint Quorums”) to etcd/raft and using them in CockroachDB to improve resilience against region failures.

Last week, we launched Cockroach University with our first course, Getting Started with CockroachDB. Our goal in building this was to provide a way for people to learn CockroachDB in an engaging and structured environment with lots of opportunities for hands-on practice, as well as a chance to show off what they’ve done. We included a graded final exam, and those who pass will receive a Certificate of Completion.

Yugabyte frequently compares themselves to CockroachDB. We investigated their claims. This is our analysis of CockroachDB vs. Yugabyte v2.0.0.

Peter Mattis

November 19, 2019

Today, we’re proud to announce the release of CockroachDB 19.2, which significantly improves the latency, reliability, and usability of CockroachDB. CockroachDB 19.2 pushes the bounds of what a distributed SQL database can do. We’re bringing the latency of distributed transactions closer to the theoretical minimum, continuing to bolster the resilience and reliability of our enterprise and open core product, and we’re making CockroachDB easier to use than ever before. Not only does 19.2 introduce new features for better ease-of-use, we’re also launching Cockroach University to improve the experience of learning and using the product. Cockroach University is a free online learning tool for developers and architects who want to gain a fundamental understanding of distributed databases and deep knowledge of CockroachDB’s functionality and architecture.