For many organizations, identity access management (IAM) systems are like the digital keys to the kingdom and the foundation for their day-to-day operations. Building and maintaining an IAM system can be extremely complex if you aren’t using the right infrastructure to support your business needs. In a previous post, we examined why IAM is critical to businesses, the challenges associated with building an IAM system, and compared a centralized vs. distributed system. Here we will discuss how you can achieve granular control over your IAM data in a distributed environment.

Cassie McAllister

January 21, 2025

In the world of finance, changing databases is usually pretty rare. When you’re in charge of other people’s money — several trillion dollars of it, in the case of one of the banks discussed in this article — even small changes could represent major risks. That’s why even today, many banks still run systems based on legacy relational databases such as Oracle, IBM, and PostgreSQL — often the same databases they were using 10 or even 20 years ago.

Cassie McAllister

January 16, 2025

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been locked out of your banking app, a hotel room, your work computer, your car, your Gmail… the list goes on. You know the reason your access was blocked was because you either forgot your keys/password or had the incorrect login credentials. Businesses of every kind implement identity and access management (IAM) systems for your protection, and their own. Failure to protect humans and resources can easily result in devastating consequences.

Cassie McAllister

January 8, 2025

Before we begin a comparison blog post about PostgreSQL, we must 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 35 years. In this post, we unpack some of the architectural differences between PostgreSQL and CockroachDB. We’ll point out where the limitations of single server, single instance architecture might pose challenges for modern cloud infrastructure, and how a distributed foundation can be a better solution for your apps and services.

Cassie McAllister

January 6, 2025

If you’ve paid a bill online, ordered an item from your favorite ecommerce site, or navigated a series of security steps to verify your identity, then you’ve interacted with the types of services powered by CockroachDB. Let's discuss 12 common use cases for CockroachDB.

Cassie McAllister

May 7, 2024

PostgreSQL has more than 35 years of active development under its belt making it one of the most powerful and reliable relational database management systems (RDBMS). Even today it’s the fourth most popular database in the world, backed by a global community of dedicated supporters. It’s a good fit for business critical workloads because PostgreSQL delivers a highly stable foundation and is ACID compliant. This is also why it’s often used in financial services and for use cases that handle money.

Cassie McAllister

April 23, 2024

For organizations that want to avoid risk the first step is often to safeguard their most important asset: data. Data loss usually happens by accident (primarily human error and system failures) and not because of malicious intent or bad actors. Maybe an employee neglects to update their software, or an entire cloud region goes down, or there’s an unexpected influx of traffic that the company wasn’t prepared for – we’ve all heard of or have been part of these stories. Recently, data protection has become more complicated because businesses are running many applications in the cloud that employees are accessing on a daily basis. The more applications, the more risk.

Cassie McAllister

April 4, 2024

In the media and streaming industry, downtime is simply not acceptable. From the infamous Game of Thrones outages, to celebrities “breaking the internet,” to fans missing critical moments of live sporting events, these types of scenarios really upset consumers. Mux specializes in delivering a platform for developers to build high-quality live and on-demand video streaming experiences. They are focused on delivering a great experience for their impressive list of customers, which means they need a reliable, fault-tolerant infrastructure. Since 2018, Mux has been building on CockroachDB and leverages a multi-region and multi-cloud setup to achieve high availability and fast performance for Mux Video. More recently, they built a new internal service on CockroachDB that allowed them to consolidate several signing keys systems into a unified global system. Not only does this internal service improve their own developers’ productivity, it also creates a better end-user experience by responding to distributed requests in real time.

Cassie McAllister

September 20, 2023

According to Gartner, by 2025 over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms. It makes sense – building with cloud-native technologies can shorten development cycles and increase operational efficiency. Not only do organizations want to build on a cloud-native foundation, but they also want to have the ability to move applications and data from one cloud computing environment (public and/or private) to another with minimal disruption – also known as cloud portability. This capability helps organizations increase resilience and avoid the risks associated with cloud concentration.

Cassie McAllister

September 13, 2023