RoachFest London 2026 has been and gone, and I'm still buzzing. I've had the honor of MCing this event for three years running, and this one just hit different. It could have been:
The livestream audience (a RoachFest first)
The magnitude of our product announcements
Or the fact that we had a real-life astronaut take to the stage?
Whatever it was, the atmosphere was electric, and I loved every second of it.
Rob Reid and the crowd were revved up at RoachFest London 2026.
What did Spencer Kimball reveal at RoachFest London 2026?
Cockroach Labs' CEO & Co-Founder Spencer Kimball opened with his keynote, "The New Database Estate," and it was the most ambitious vision he's laid out in eleven years of building CockroachDB.
At its heart: Agentic AI isn't just adding load to existing systems, it's changing the scale equation entirely. The infrastructure most enterprises run on today simply wasn't built for it. This is why distributed databases are becoming a fundamental requirement for every enterprise.
Then Spencer showed us what CockroachDB is becoming, with four composable layers to meet the moment:
A purpose-built storage substrate delivering 10x throughput improvement and 70 percent storage cost reduction
Elastic physical clusters with compute decoupled from storage
Virtual clusters - a million of them inside a single physical cluster - pushing aggregate utilization from today's 5-15% toward 50%
An AI operations team for every database: not a copilot, but a continuous, multi-tier team of specialized agents operating every cluster under human-defined policy
The audience leaned in when Spencer shared the roadmap for virtual clusters: the ability to run not just a handful of CockroachDB clusters, but millions within a handful of physical clusters, at much lower cost and much higher performance.
Spencer Kimball, CEO & Co-Founder of Cockroach Labs had fresh revelations.
What stood out from this year's sessions?
The main stage lineup delivered exactly what I love about RoachFest: front-lines stories from real production environments.
Kevin Holditch, VP of Engineering at Form3, walked us through how their real-time payment platform has evolved into a cloud-agnostic, active/active/active architecture spanning AWS, GCP, and Azure. Form3 validates disaster recovery by intentionally shutting down an entire cloud provider for 24 hours in production, serving tier-1 banks. With no impact. When was the last time you could do that!?
Kevin shared that he only realized the entirety of GCP had gone down from a news article. As a direct result of running their business, and their CockroachDB cluster, across cloud providers, they didn't lose a single payment during Google's two-hour outage that impacted thousands of businesses.
I moderated the AI agents panel with Adam B. Struck from Memori Labs and Jordan Legg from Takara AI. During our "What does it take to build long-term state for AI agents?" panel, we dug into the tradeoffs behind semantic retrieval, SQL-native memory layers, and keeping agent state consistent, scalable, and useful across long-running and multi-agent workflows. The conversation went to unexpected places.
Vik Bhatti, Senior Engineering Manager at Primer, shared how they migrated their live payments platform from PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS to CockroachDB, with zero downtime. Primer routes payments across dozens of providers worldwide, and their write-heavy workload had wrung everything it could out of RDS.
Vertical scaling has a ceiling, and a single writer adds complexity and outage risk as you grow and go multi-region. CockroachDB let them blast through that ceiling: Vik used two different migration strategies for different workloads, held zero downtime throughout, and his slide – "RDS is dead, long live Cockroach!" – was a real mic drop moment.
Igor Stanko, Cockroach Labs VP of Product, delivered the roadmap session. Highlights include:
CockroachDB is separating compute from storage, delivering 2x better price-performance and fundamentally changing the economics of distributed SQL.
The AI-Migration Assistant, which uses AI to automate schema and logic conversion from PostgreSQL and MySQL sources, with the goal of reducing migration time and cost by 50 percent (with a demo from yours truly)
Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) is now GA across AWS, GCP, and Azure.
Kubernetes Operator going GA in July.
It was an essential session for teams that care about where databases are heading, and everyone in the room did.
Kevin Holditch, VP of Engineering at Form3 shared startling resilience stories.
What happens when an astronaut takes the stage at a database conference?
I said in the RoachFest preview that I never expected my CockroachDB journey would lead to sharing a stage with an astronaut. And now I've done it.
Major Tim Peake CMG is a former Army Air Corps officer, test pilot, and the European Space Agency's first British astronaut to the International Space Station. He took to the RoachFest stage for his talk, "Operating Without Fear: What Space Missions Teach Us About Resilience." The talk drew on his experiences aboard the ISS and in the military to share lessons on preparation, redundancy, teamwork, and performing under pressure when the unexpected happens.
Tim was outstanding, the best and most inspiring speaker I've ever seen. He's a man who laughs in the face of literal life and death situations, a walking definition of resilience. It occurred to me during his talk that the last speaking slot was the only sensible slot for Tim. I don't think any human – on or off Earth – is equipped to follow him.
Major Tim Peake CMG captivated us all.
Beyond the main stage, this year's RoachFest had more to offer than ever. There were two morning workshops, one on CockroachDB core architecture, the other on transactional vector search and RAG, to help attendees go deep before the sessions began. The Crawl Space stage featured up-close conversations, including Cockroach Labs Staff Sales Engineer Anna Eriksson's "Straight from the Field" and a rapid-fire "This or That" with Jordan Legg, Chief AI Officer at Takara AI. And "Spill the Tea with Spencer" was unfiltered as advertised (I told my American counterparts that it's "Spill the Beans" in ye olde England, but… overruled!).
Workshops connected RoachFest attendees with Cockroach Labs expertise.
RoachFest London 2026 is a wrap, but there's more to come. While the talks were phenomenal, the biggest thing you missed if you couldn't be there in person is our wonderful community: engineers, architects, and leaders in a beautiful space, chatting and laughing together. That's the part a livestream can't replicate.
All sessions will be available on our RoachFest on-demand hub so you can watch (or rewatch) at your own pace. And stay tuned for RoachFest Bengaluru, details coming soon.
Rob Reid is a technical evangelist at Cockroach Labs and the MC of RoachFest London 2026. Visit Rob's author page for a full bio.
