In 2008, after Netflix pivoted from DVD-by-mail to streaming, they were running the streaming service on premise and suffered a 3-day outage. That was the beginning of their move to the cloud. First they moved to AWS. Then, in 2014, they adopted (and popularized!) Cassandra to support their need for global replication. In this two-part presentation, Netflix Senior Software Engineers Shengwei Wang and Shahar Zimmerman explain why Netflix has adopted CockroachDB and how they’re deploying it.

Dan Kelly

November 27, 2023

Delivering low latency across regions is a hard problem to solve. Maintaining high availability when an application is spread out all over the world is also hard. Starburst is only a five-year-old company but they’re already handling exabytes of scale across a five-region deployment; keeping read-latencies low everywhere.

Dan Kelly

November 22, 2023

Having a reliable order management system (OMS) has always been critical to a wide variety of businesses – that’s been true since the days when taking an order or an appointment meant writing information onto a piece of paper with a rotary phone handset cradled between your ear and your neck. Most businesses are taking orders and appointments in a manner that’s much less manual and much more scalable these days, thanks to the help of third-party tools that can provide plug-and-play order management systems to handle sales, orders, inventory, appointments, and much more electronically. Life is easier, and business owners might even have less neck pain. But building those third-party systems is a high-stakes endeavour for modern tech businesses like Booksy, a global digital appointment booking service that makes it easy for customers to make appointments at beauty, health, and wellness salons. Booksy is a popular service that supported nearly 100 million bookings in 2021 across 25 different countries. But it had to overcome a massive challenge to reach that scale: modernizing outdated infrastructure while growing quickly – and without harming customer satisfaction. “Google Cloud and CockroachDB are the building blocks that we use to create a globally available platform.” - Paweł Sobkowiak, CTO, Booksy

Dan Kelly

August 31, 2023

At Netflix, data movement and data processing are essential functions that present significant challenges because of the vastness of their data architecture. There are so many different data sources to keep in sync and so many different consumers of the data that need accurate (and often) real-time access. Solving these challenges requires some clever engineering gymnastics that we’ll get to below. The content for this blog comes from a conversation between Netflix Senior Engineer, Vlad Sydorenko, and our own Director of Engineering, Jordan Lewis, in which they unpack how Netflix moves and processes data that comes from CockroachDB. (If you want to get to know Vlad a little bit you can check out this short interview.) The insights gleaned from their event-driven system help drive important business decisions that create better user experiences and substantial value for the company. Those insights are possible because of the data mesh that connects different sources, defines a pipeline, and makes the data accessible and useful.

Dan Kelly

June 22, 2023

Before the dominance of the cloud, calculating the cost of a database was a pretty simple equation: software costs + hardware costs = database costs. If you chose an open source product, the software cost might melt away. While the cloud has fundamentally changed how we consume and deploy software, too many people are still using this outdated calculation. The truth is, there are a lot more things to consider when pricing out the total cost of a database. The hardware and software costs are still there, but you also need to think about the price of scaling the database, of integrating with your existing and future systems, and of planned–or unplanned–downtime.

Dan Kelly

April 4, 2023

Every week, the Big Ideas in App Architecture podcast seeks to extract answers to questions like those from the brightest minds in software development. CTOs, CIOs, VPEs, and Architects from companies like Twilio, Greenhouse, Starburst, and others will share their career path, the current landscape of application architecture challenges today, and strategies they’ve employed to build modern, resilient, data-intensive apps and services.

Dan Kelly

February 27, 2023

Our parents think we work for an extermination company. Accountants do double-takes. Allergists are intrigued. Homeland security agents have extra questions. Delivery drivers make quick, frightened visits to our floor (some refuse to come up at all!). At conferences people want to know why cockroach and we say, “…because it’s the database you can’t kill…” and the heads nod. CockroachDB is a polarizing name. But software engineers get it.

Dan Kelly

February 8, 2023

Modern hyper-growth merchants do not want to manage complex payment system architecture. They want to expand network tokenization offerings and make their systems more automated and API driven. Merchants like SeatGeek, for example, want to build a ticket sales system that makes payment processing simple and performant for their end users. The challenge for merchants like SeatGeek is that they need to adopt modern tools and push for automation while also continuing to meet all the standard data protection requirements of the financial services industry. At the most fundamental level, when merchants migrate from single datacenter architecture to a cloud-native, distributed architecture the data has to stay safe (at rest and in flight) and consistent. It requires a specific set of tools to meet fintech security standards while also modernizing the tech stack and distributing the data. That’s exactly the journey that Spreedly embarked on when they decided to migrate their payments orchestration service from a legacy database to CockroachDB.

Dan Kelly

November 20, 2022

“Do you know what time it is? Time to die.” -Nomi That’s it. That’s row-level TTL in a James Bond nutshell. Which is appropriate given that today is James Bond Day. You probably don’t need to read further than that one quote from Nomi (possibly the next 007?). Because you get it now. But row-level TTL has been one of our most requested features dating back to 2017. It’s rare for issues on our github to get this many votes. So I hope you’ll forgive me for indulging in this metaphor a bit longer.

Dan Kelly

October 5, 2022