At RoachFest23, Fortinet Director of Software Development Louis Jia shared the story of FortiSASE’s migration from CockroachDB SH (self-hosted) to CockroachDB managed services.

Michelle Gienow

November 15, 2023

I periodically need to make changes to tables. Adding columns is very simple with the ALTER TABLE command… But my tables have up to 40 million rows now, and they are growing fast. So those alter table commands take several hours… Since I’m using Amazon RDS, I can’t have replica servers to play with offline and then promote to primary in prod. So my question is if there’s a way to do this with minimal downtime? I don’t mind an operation taking hours or even days if users can still use the db…” — Stack Overflow, serverfault

Michelle Gienow

November 8, 2023

Before we define what a serverless database is, perhaps we should talk about what serverless means more broadly, and why there seems to be building momentum behind this general paradigm.

Michelle Gienow

November 2, 2023

The root cause of many outages is human error. At RoachFest23, Thomas Boltze (Head of Cloud and Engineering Excellence with Santander) shared the core tenets of building operationally resilient systems and how to practice them in the real world — fallible humans and all.

Michelle Gienow

November 1, 2023

More than 500 attendees from around the globe recently swarmed into New York for RoachFest23, the annual user conference for CockroachDB customers. The two day event featured thirty speakers from some of the world’s leading enterprise companies including engineering leads and directors at Santander, DoorDash, City Storage Systems (also known as Cloud Kitchens), Booking.com, Fortinet, and many more. The Cockroach Labs co-founders also led sessions, shared the future of CockroachDB, and released new features and capabilities now available in CockroachDB.

Michelle Gienow

October 19, 2023

Nearly every business has tier 0 applications that are critical for delivering their services to customers: these are the applications that make the money. Any disruption or downtime can result in significant financial losses and damage to a company’s reputation. Adopting multi-region application architecture mitigates these risks and ensures high availability. In this blog post, we will explore the concept of multi-region application architecture and discuss how it helps in risk mitigation while providing high availability.

Michelle Gienow

October 11, 2023

The world is getting weird. Increasingly epic weather events, multiplying global geopolitical uncertainties, and stubborn economic stressors make for an exceptionally unpredictable business environment. To navigate this unfortunate but unavoidable “new normal”, enterprises need a strong but flexible foundation in both business continuity and operational resilience. Aren’t these basically the same thing? Nope. It’s a common misconception that operational resilience is the more or less automatic outcome of having solid business continuity planning in place. The two are intertwined but separate: Business continuity is planning how to respond, and then recover, in the event of a given disaster (CSP outage, DDOS attack, insert your own worst nightmare scenario here…). Operational resilience means proactively building in capabilities to ensure that, if said disaster does happen, it doesn’t affect you in the first place. And both are, in their own ways, essential for an organization’s survival and success.

Michelle Gienow

September 25, 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