Product

When it comes to payment and billing applications, not only is availability crucial, but development teams need to build idempotency into their system to guarantee data correctness.

Cassie McAllister

August 30, 2023

Major cloud platform outages used to be rare events. As the amount of global data increases exponentially, however (90% of the world’s data was generated in the last two years alone!) significant outages are becoming increasingly common. The potential user impact of cloud service provider (CSP) outages hits both deep and wide. For example, GCP’s europe-west9 full-region outage in April 2023 and AWS’s us-east-1 outage in June 2023 each temporarily disrupted operations for the businesses, schools, hospitals, and even government agencies relying on their services in those regions. And these are but two among many recent CSP downtime events: Data shows a steady rise in total observed global network outages in 2023 so far. The growing frequency of outages like these keeps the world’s government officials up at night. One of their deepest concerns is for the potentially catastrophic impact a major CSP failure could have on financial institutions — and the very real-world damage this could do to their economies. Concern is increasingly turning to action as different countries propose technical requirements aimed at ensuring operational resilience for their financial institutions (as well as other critical services like utilities, transportation, and healthcare). Technical requirements that are already becoming formal government regulations in some countries, with many more on the horizon. What does this mean for all organizations right now, and what can they do to prepare?

Michelle Gienow

August 24, 2023

[This post was originally published in October 2022. It has been updated to reflect current product offerings.] Traditionally, one of the stickiest decisions developers need to make when creating a database is choosing how many servers to use based on expected application traffic. Guess too low and your db could fall over under load, causing an outage. Guess too high, you pay for servers that just sit idle most of the time. Spiky loads? Uh oh, gotta overprovision to make sure those surges get handled even if it means wasted capacity 90%+ of the time.

Michelle Gienow

August 18, 2023

Indexes can have a significant impact on database performance. Let’s take a look at one type that’s especially important for searching text: the inverted index.

Charlie Custer

August 17, 2023

A data pipeline is a piece of software that ingests data from one or more sources, and moves that data to one or more destinations. Often, the data is transformed as part of this process to ensure that it meets the requirements of the system or systems it is being sent to.

Charlie Custer

August 2, 2023

We’ve all done it. Imagine you’re browsing around the AllSaints online shop, dreaming about refreshing your fall wardrobe. You find a couple items and add them to your cart. You continue browsing but then, for some reason, you don’t check out. Instead, you close the browser tab and move on. In the e-commerce world, this is what’s known as shopping cart abandonment.

Aydrian Howard

July 26, 2023

By all accounts, multicloud is the future. And for lots of companies, multicloud is already the present. But multicloud is also a big buzzword. It’s not always clear what people even mean when they’re talking about, for example, multicloud deployments. In this article, we’ll take a look at what multicloud, hybrid cloud, and intercloud really mean. We’ll also introduce a new term, single-workload multicloud, to refer to a specific type of multicloud deployment. Finally, we’ll dig into some of the key factors to consider when trying to choose which of these deployment methods is best for you.

Charlie Custer

July 17, 2023

Managing all infrastructure as code is a way of ensuring that no configuration drift occurs and that performance is as expected. This is critical when you’re managing applications at scale where the impact of configuration drift is exponential. In this tutorial blog we’ll demonstrate how CockroachDB Dedicated (our DBaaS) can be managed as code via our integration with Terraform. With this integration you are able to integrate your database with the other elements of the software stack you are deploying. And then you can use pipeline tools to deploy your application as a complete stack including the database.

It would be wrong to begin a comparison blog post about PostgreSQL without first acknowledging that it is one of the most reliable and widely used databases in the history of software. The world owes a debt of gratitude to the open source community that has built and supported this important project for the last 30 years. In this post, we simply unpack some of the architectural differences between PostgreSQL and CockroachDB. In the process we’ll point out where the limitations of single server, single instance architecture might pose challenges for modern cloud infrastructure.

Jim Walker

July 12, 2023