This article is authored by Lakshmi Kannan, Senior Director of Product Management at Cockroach Labs.
As companies continue to shift from monolithic, single data center architectures to globally distributed cloud infrastructures, the demands placed on databases have never been higher. Operational databases now need to support everything from bursty, unpredictable applications to highly available, globally distributed applications and everything in between. And they need to do so while ensuring data locality to assist with compliance and staying within companies’ total cost of ownership (TCO) estimates.
Our customers tend to adopt a range of database technologies, even strictly for transactional applications, depending on the use case, TCO, scale, and security requirements. As the database technology choices multiply, each with a specific purpose, the deployment, management and operations of these databases become more challenging. There are fewer economies of scale, and less operational flexibility and efficiency. In addition, there is often increased spend to maintain these technologies, both from legacy as well as cloud-native environments.
Evolving to meet customer needs: The path to a comprehensive cloud platform
At Cockroach Labs, we’ve been pioneers of distributed SQL, solving challenges of scale, resiliency, and data domiciling for close to a decade – working with our customers to understand their most critical needs. In 2018, we released the very first version of our managed Cloud service, a singular offering called “CockroachDB Dedicated” which was aimed at our largest customers requiring full isolation and resilience capabilities.
In 2022, we extended our vision to CockroachDB Serverless: a “SQL API in the cloud” with consumption-based pricing and auto-scaling capabilities. Both these offerings were wildly popular for very different use cases on different sides of the spectrum of price, predictability and enterprise readiness: from simply testing out CockroachDB and experimentation to running large-scale banking apps, travel agency bookings, and financial transactions.
However, we heard from customers who wanted a more comprehensive database platform for all operational needs across the axes of scale, cost, and security. Not all their applications required unlimited scale or PCI-DSS compliance capabilities and the premium pricing that comes attached with these capabilities. Many of our enterprise customers actually preferred better price predictability over fully usage-based pricing depending on the type of applications. Customers wanted future proofing for global scale but didn’t necessarily want to pay for all of their future scale when they were just getting started with a new project. And while they wanted to use CockroachDB for all these new use cases, our current offerings weren’t satisfying these varied needs. With these customer problems in mind, we started envisioning what a comprehensive cloud database platform for operational workloads might look like.
Introducing Standard clusters: Cost-effective scalability with enterprise-grade security
We’re excited to introduce our latest addition to our Cloud database platform: the new Standard plan. The Standard plan delivers the perfect balance of cost efficiency, scalability, and security, completing our vision for an all-encompassing enterprise-grade cloud platform. This plan is ideal for consolidating multiple workloads while optimizing costs, enabling businesses to start small and scale effortlessly as needs grow. With this addition, the CockroachDB Cloud Platform now offers a full suite of solutions to support your needs across the entire application lifecycle — whether you’re starting small or scaling globally.
Key features of the Standard plan include:
Provisioned capacity: Ensures predictable performance with provisioned resources that can instantly scale up to 60 vCPUs per region.
Enhanced security: Private connectivity to your clusters with AWS PrivateLink and Google Cloud Private Service Connect.
Observability: Integrations with Datadog, Prometheus, and CloudWatch for comprehensive monitoring, along with audit logging for compliance.
Cost efficiency: Provides dramatic savings — up to 40% compared to our Advanced plan — while maintaining the high performance and security enterprises need.
There’s one other additional capability that makes Standard clusters a great option for multi-region applications. A common scenario we see is as follows: a customer has most of their end users in one region, say US-east. They are in the process of expanding to Europe and Asia, and they start off with a fraction of users and traffic in these regions. They want a multi-region cluster but provisioning capacity across the new Europe and Asia regions can be cost prohibitive as our current Advanced clusters (formerly known as Dedicated) require equal amounts of compute in each region. With Standard clusters, you provision capacity at the overall cluster level, no matter how many regions you select. This means, we automatically replicate and allocate data to the relevant regions based on application traffic. This is both a superior user experience since our customers only have to think about capacity at the cluster level, and is a more affordable option for multi-region applications as we only allocate the necessary compute capacity for each region.
CockroachDB Cloud: Flexible plans for every phase of your growth
The CockroachDB Cloud platform now offers three distinct plans, ensuring that no matter where you are in your cloud journey, there’s a solution that fits your needs:
Basic [Formerly known as Serverless]: Perfect for smaller applications or those just getting started. With on-demand pricing, and multi-region support, it’s an excellent option for development, testing, and small production workloads.
Standard [Brand new plan currently in PREVIEW]: Tailored for consolidating production workloads while managing costs. It provides enterprise-grade capabilities and predictable pricing with provisioned pricing at dramatically lower costs, making it a great fit for organizations in growth mode.
Advanced [Formerly known as Dedicated]: Built for critical production applications with advanced compliance and security requirements. This plan offers dedicated hardware, stringent SLAs, customization options and support on all three major clouds and all their regions.
Designed for operational simplicity and scale
With CockroachDB Cloud, we’ve focused on making database management simpler. All our plans come out of the box with support for our Terraform provider, Cloud organization roles, and security capability like SSO, as well as full support for CockroachDB’s replication and SQL capabilities. From deployment to scaling, CockroachDB Cloud eliminates the manual processes that often slow down operations. By streamlining operations, CockroachDB Cloud can help organizations consolidate their infrastructure while improving overall efficiency and reducing costs.
Start your free trial today
We’re offering free credits worth $400 to help you get started with CockroachDB Cloud today. As a fully managed service, CockroachDB Cloud is the easiest way to store and manage operational and transaction data for a variety of workloads. CockroachDB is designed to minimize the steps necessary to use CockroachDB within your AWS, Azure or GCP environments. Database operators need to only take these steps to starting using CockroachDB Cloud:
Create an account: First create a CockroachDB Cloud account and log in.
Deploy a cluster: Next, create a cluster from the CockroachDB Cloud console. We have a quickstart guide that will walk you through the process of creating your cluster.
Create a SQL user: Once you have created your cluster, the next step is to create a new SQL user and password.
Connect to a cluster: Finally, connect a sample application to your cluster, or you can start querying your cluster using the browser SQL Shell.
That’s it! Now you are ready to use CockroachDB Cloud. Check out this video overview of the CockroachDB Cloud platform – our technical evangelist walks through the process of getting started using the Standard Plan.
Get started at https://cockroachlabs.cloud/signup.
