Cockroach Labs will be participating in Acceleration Economy’s Cloud Database Battleground on January 27. Here’s a look at the company.
Who They Are
There are many companies that have memorable names to just be catchy, but Cockroach Labs has made a name for itself for all the right reasons. Founded in 2015 by CEO Spencer Kimball, CTO Peter Mattis, and Chief Architect Benjamin Darnell, they set out to build something different by launching early versions of CockroachDB as open-source on GitHub.
The community-use mindset of Cockroach Labs caught the eyes of investors. Their belief in Cockroach Labs has brought in total funding of about $633 million as of December 2021 which brought their valuation to about $5 billion.
At the core of the business model is the “Roacher” culture built on a human-forward mentality. This culture was recognized by Inc. Magazine as one of the “Best Workplaces for 2021”. Further, this has fostered an inclusive environment through “RoacherPride” which celebrates “the LGBTQIA+ community and allies who come together to socialize, discuss issues”.
Cockroach Labs has hundreds of customers around the world with recognizable names such as Netflix, Bose, and Shipt. Additionally, they have built an impressive partner ecosystem with Confluent, Red Hat, VMware, and many others.
“The ease with which new products and services can be built and delivered via the cloud has accelerated competition in nearly every market — in order to compete and win in any market, companies must meet and even exceed advancing consumer expectations”
CEO Spencer Kimball in an interview with VentureBeat
What They Do
The solutions offered by Cockroach Labs come in four flavors which provide customers with options that work for them. At the core of these options is the CockroachDB which they describe as “the world’s most evolved cloud SQL database — giving all of your apps effortless scale, bulletproof resilience, and low latency performance for users anywhere.”
- CockroachDB Core is the always-free, open-source version of CockroachDB. It contains all the foundational capabilities of a distributed SQL database at no-cost.
- CockroachDB Serverless is a fully managed, autonomous CockroachDB cluster which is great for starter projects and evaluation
- CockroachDB Dedicated is a fully managed, reserved CockroachDB cluster which is an ideal deployment for a cloud database
- CockroachDB Self-Hosted is self-managed and used CockroachDB clusters with direct control and ability to run anywhere
The foundation of these solutions is built upon four critical capabilities that provide customers with peace of mind and the flexibility to adjust needs as business models change.
Scalability
Elastic, Efficient Scale: Eliminate the need for complex database operations and scale whenever and wherever you want
Resiliency
Highly Available, Resilient Data: Ensure uninterrupted, high-performance queries during failure of a server, rack, or region
Consistency
Simple, consistent SQL: Use the tools and the language you use today and guarantee your data is always correct
Geo-Partitioning
Multi-Region, Multi-Cloud Deployments – Start small and grow to meet your users no matter where they are with a single database
Lastly, Cockroach Labs understands that not all companies and industries operate the same. With this in mind, there are six industry-specific solutions purpose-built for unique needs:
Financial Services
Ensure your customers have continuous access to their applications, services, and private data from anywhere in the world.
Gambling
For gambling and sports betting companies, trust is a competitive advantage. Customer loyalty is won by ensuring your app is always performant, stats are updated in real-time, and every payout is penny-perfect.
Gaming
The gaming industry is built on delivering a great customer experience. However, user-generated content can create unpredictable workloads.
High Tech
Development teams need a competitive edge to build breakthrough applications and services without adding operational complexity. Plus, choosing the right database for future aspirations saves time, money, and headaches down the road.
Manufacturing & Logistics
Managing millions of transactions per day can create significant challenges if you have the wrong infrastructure in place, and downtime is not an option when it comes to managing logistics in real-time.
Retail & eCommerce
Don’t let your database be a bottleneck to running and growing a successful business. Build on a modern, scalable, and resilient foundation and cater to customers across the globe.
Who They Have Impacted
Undoubtedly, the pandemic had a dramatic impact on the education industry. From students to teachers, from in-person to online learning, from standard routines to disrupted schedules, every area was impacted.
For Kami, a New Zealand-based company founded in 2013, they witnessed about five years of digital education trends compressed into about seven months. And Kami isn’t your typical education-based company, they had a pretty astounding challenge and an astonishing scale.
- 30 million users
- 7 engineers
- 20x growth
- 180+ countries
- 4-month migration
- About 1 billion transactions/day
Jordan Thomas, co-founder and CTO of Kami expressed what they faced, “We knew how complicated it would have been to stay with Postgres and set up sharding. There would have been a constant drag of managing multiple shards of data. No one on our team wanted to go through that manual labor. And even if we did set up sharding, we weren’t going to be able to grow our business 10x.”
After collaborating with Cockroach Labs and completing the migration, Kami is experiencing impressive results:
- Primary API sees up to 25K requests per second
- Over 90K qps to CockroachDB.requests per second
- Google Kubernetes Engine environment auto-scales daily up to 3,000 cores and 11TB RAM
Further, Kami saw a 20x growth in business in six months with the greatest usage in the United States. However, they are seeing huge growth in other countries such as Canada, UK, and South Asia.
