Quick – name the top NYC destination for data professionals on September 26. Was it:
The Statue of Liberty
Central Park
RoachFest24
If you said #3, congratulations! That is correct. RoachFest 2024 in NYC has wrapped, the first year of Cockroach Labs’ popular event going global. Following successful deployments in Menlo Park and London in June, our packed NYC gathering on the waterfront was the optimal outro for RoachFest24.
Held at Chelsea Piers’ scenic Pier 59, attendees in Cockroach Labs’ NYC hometown experienced an intensive schedule of insights: Headliners included Microsoft, Global Payments, Starburst Data, The Estée Lauder Companies, and City Storage Systems.
Love to learn? Then the Cockroach University booth was for YOU, staffed by our Education Team who discussed our freely available online courses, new training packages, and professional certification program.
Those onsite were also the first to learn about the latest additions to our leading cloud native distributed SQL database, CockroachDB. Exciting new features in CockroachDB 24.2 include:
Vector Search (now in preview) to support AI-driven needs
Generic Query Plans (now in preview) to lower query latency, optimize infrastructure and expand workload capabilities
Innovation Releases for less time between versions – get quick updates to leverage new CockroachDB features
Important updates to CockroachDB Cloud were also announced. With the introduction of a new Standard plan, enterprises can consolidate workloads while optimizing cost and performance. It’s part of a streamlined path to cloud adoption and there’s three plans available: Basic, Standard, and Advanced.
RoachFest is the event series made for application owners, data architects, and database administrators, engineers, and operators. It’s an essential resource for data pros who are running their apps on CockroachDB, or just want to learn the latest developments in highly resilient databases.
Throughout the day, attendees plugged into the extra in-person buzzzzzzzz that you get only in NYC. Advanced info was in full flight across the presentations and breakout sessions, with nonstop networking during breakfast, breaks, and the legendary post-RoachFest cocktail hour. Representatives from our Global Sponsors AWS and Microsoft were onsite in full force.
The event’s MC was Chris Casano, Senior Director of Customer Engineering for the Americas at Cockroach Labs.
“We saw a healthy mix of new attendees and repeat visitors to RoachFest24 in NYC,” he said. “While many of them had come to learn the basics of CockroachDB, there were also highly experienced users that appreciated the advanced presentations. It was also interesting to see that while many of the Menlo Park talks were more Kubernetes-focused, there was a greater multi-region emphasis in NYC.”
“The best part of RoachFest, however, is seeing the networking happen,” he continues. “You can see how happy data professionals are to meet up IRL: These are people with common business challenges, openly sharing how they solve them. I also saw the presenters getting tracked down by attendees afterwards, to learn more about how they tackled database obstacles. The spontaneous brainstorming and sharing of internal battles that were overcome – that’s the best part of the event.”
RoachFest24: networking NYC style!
Recap: New York City, September 26th, @ Current at Pier 59, Chelsea Piers
Cockroach Labs’ Co-Founder and CEO, Spencer Kimball, was first to take the stage with the keynote address, “Redefining Resilience in Today's Modern World.” His talk dove into the mainstream adoption of distributed SQL, with its transformative impact on global scalability and resilience in modern applications.
A major point of emphasis was the importance of building a resilient architecture, especially in the face of ever-growing data challenges posed by new applications, regulatory demands, and the rise of AI. Kimball also highlighted how CockroachDB’s resiliency platform enables enterprises to meet end-user expectations seamlessly, adapting swiftly to changes without experiencing any downtime.
Cockroach Labs’ Co-Founder and CEO, Spencer Kimball, onstage at RoachFest24 in NYC.
Global Payments: Setting New Standards for Reliability in Cloud Native Multi-Region Applications with CockroachDB
Global Payments provides a unique end-to-end global commerce platform in 100+ countries.
This talk really paid off for RoachFest24 attendees! Global Payments, a global FinTech leader handling over 32 billion card transactions across 816 million accounts, shared their journey of modernizing a mission-critical legacy application. The presentation, delivered by Trey Caliva, Principal Cloud Architect, Global Payments, and Ajay Goyal, Senior Database Developer, Global Payments delved into the architectural choices that enabled them to achieve extreme fault tolerance via a multi-region cloud-native deployment.
RoachFest24 NYC attendees arrived ready to learn the latest in data.
By migrating to the cloud, Global Payments not only enhanced disaster recovery capabilities, but also maintained subsecond latencies while adhering to strict compliance standards. It gave a behind-the-scenes look at how to set new performance and reliability benchmarks using advanced cloud-native systems.
“We perform chaos experiments where we try to take down zones or regions, and perform load testing while upgrading the cluster,” Caliva said. “CockroachDB simply continues running. We got amazing performance results – and the resiliency results we got were mind-blowing.”
(l-r) Global Payments’ Trey Caliva, Principal Cloud Architect, and Ajay Goyal, Senior Database Developer
“Microsoft Azure: Building Modern & Resilient Data Infrastructure”
Microsoft innovates AI, cloud, productivity, computing, gaming, apps, and more that homes and businesses rely on worldwide.
Nothing’s micro about Microsoft’s big database insights at RoachFest24. In this fascinating partner keynote, Microsoft’s Gbenga Ige, Global Leader for Digital Native Strategy, Microsoft, highlighted the critical need for organizations to modernize their infrastructure and data estates.
Ige’s energetic talk emphasized how these advancements are not only crucial to meeting the demands of a global economy, but also pivotal in fulfilling customer expectations for constant availability. He underscored the role of AI in driving these changes, and how modernizing infrastructure can boost customer satisfaction and open new doors for growth in our increasingly digital world. "With CockroachDB, we believe our partnership makes a 'better together' story," Ige stated.
Gbenga Ige, Global Leader for Digital Native Strategy, Microsoft, provided a compelling modernization timeline at RoachFest24 NYC.
In a fireside convo, Lulu Chen, Leader, Azure Solutions, Software & Digital Platform, spoke with Rasmus Bach Krabbe, Engineering Manager of City Storage Systems, a provider of disruptive restaurant infrastructure. They discussed the business challenges that led City Storage Systems to choose CockroachDB, and the benefits of running our cloud-native distributed SQL database on Microsoft Azure: resiliency, guaranteed consistency, horizontal scale, enterprise security and compliance, and convergence with GenAI.
“In our business we can't have downtime because our restaurants are trusting us to deliver on their promise to customers,” Krabbe said. “We strategically chose CockroachDB so we could run across multi-regions with the option to extend across multiple clouds for the utmost resilience.”
Lulu Chen, Leader, Azure Solutions, Software & Digital Platform, Microsoft hosted a fireside chat with Rasmus Bach Krabbe, Engineering Manager of City Storage Systems.
Networking Lunch Break!
RoachFest24 was no ordinary conference, and neither was our lunch break!!! This was a truly scrumptious spread.
Bon apetit! at Chelsea Piers' Current
Accompanying Pier 59’s first class cuisine: high traffic flow to the aforementioned Cockroach University booth. In addition to the U’s self-paced online course offerings, attendees learned about our instructor-led private sessions for training teams via lectures, rich hands-on labs, and live Q&A with CockroachDB experts.
Cockroach U came to you.
Even better, the morning rain went away. Networking and spirited convos spilled out onto Pier 59’s beautiful waterfront space, complete with inspiring marina views. New friendships were formed, sparking deep conversations about databases and much more.
Let's take this outside.
Lunch done, the RoachFest24 talk track was back. Afternoon sessions included unveiling key new features in CockroachDB 24.2.
Alicia Lu, Product Manager, Cockroach Labs, debuted our asynchronous replication tools, Physical Cluster Replication and Logical Data Replication. Later, CockroachDB Cloud’s new Basic/Standard/Advanced plans were discussed by Lakshmi Kannan, Director, Product Management, Cockroach Labs.
But RoachFest’s spotlight shines brightest on our users! Here’s the afternoon customer presentations. Next on the agenda was:
“How CockroachDB Powers Starburst's Multi-region Cloud Lakehouse Platform”
Built on Trino, a SQL analytics engine, Starburst is a leading open data lakehouse for cloud and on-premises.
Craving the inside story behind building Starburst Galaxy, Starburst Data’s cloud-managed service for their distributed data lakehouse platform? Matt Stephenson, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Starburst Data, told all at RoachFest24.
In 2021, their team faced the challenge of rolling out this service across multiple regions, while ensuring low latency and high availability for their users. Stephenson detailed why Starburst Data turned to CockroachDB Cloud to meet survivability and performance needs, and how we enabled them to achieve seamless multi-region deployment and enhanced user experience.
“We built Starburst Galaxy on CockroachDB Cloud from the beginning,” he told the audience. “So we aren’t managing it ourselves. It speeds up development substantially for us. Anyone that understood PostgreSQL could start working with it pretty immediately.”
Starburst Data's Matt Stephenson, Senior Principal Software Engineer, delivered fresh database insights at RoachFest24.
“Low Latency Multi-Regional Microservices: Coordinating Data Locality”
City Storage Systems builds disruptive restaurant infrastructure for better food.
City Storage Systems (CSS) is no stranger to RoachFest – their NYC presentation followed a Fireside Chat appearance at Menlo Park, plus the morning appearance with Microsoft Azure. A bold startup known for disrupting restaurant infrastructure despite its "aggressively boring name," CSS shared their innovative path to low latency in complex multi-region microservice and database architectures.
Frederik Stenum Mogensen, Software Engineer, CSS, showed how his team leverages CockroachDB’s zone configuration and a custom-built Kubernetes operator to dynamically coordinate data locality. The result: strongly consistent access without cross-region roundtrips, which reduces request latencies and cuts costs by minimizing cross-region data transfers.
Frederik Stenum Mogensen, Software Engineer, CSS, explained how CSS and CockroachDB are elevating efficiency in distributed systems.
“How Estée Lauder is leveraging CockroachDB to power a single multi-tenant ecommerce platform”
The Estée Lauder Companies is a global leader in prestige beauty.
Who would deliver RoachFest24’s final customer presentation? That honor went to the Estée Lauder Companies (ELC), with an inspiring talk by Christopher Lai, Executive Director of Engineering.
“About a year ago we had the opportunity to build a new platform and we identified a critical area of our system that was a bottleneck – and that was the database,” he reflected. Lai discussed why ELC’s extensive global ecommerce presence required a database that could ensure low-latency performance while adhering to regional regulations.
As the backbone of ELC’s eCommerce platform, CockroachDB powers inventory management, checkout, payments, and customer access. Lai showed how CockroachDB creates a scalable, multi-tenant platform that ensures always-on performance for ELC – an intriguing window into luxury retail, and an invigorating outro for RoachFest24.
Christopher Lai, Executive Director of Engineering, Estée Lauder Companies got emotional -- dev style -- at RoachFest24 NYC.
CockroachDB and the Data Community
But of course there was more – time to convene for cocktails and convos! As everyone decompressed and buzzed on batch processing, it was clear: We’re ready for RoachFest 2025.
For MC Chris Casano, 2024’s global RoachFest confirmed a vibrant community is eager to gather and share data best practices.
“This shows the power of the database,” he says. “It’s CockroachDB bringing people together. RoachFest helps with the big challenges many industries face, like how to make a data modernization plan. It’s what we love to do: solve for enterprise database consistency, resilience, and scale.”
Learn more about CockroachDB: Visit here to speak with an expert.
An incredible convergence: cocktails, conversations, and Cockroach Labs!
