Everyone here at Cockroach Labs is thrilled about the publication of our very own O’Reilly tome, CockroachDB: The Definitive Guide. Seriously delighted — as in, just-found-out-the-rest-of-today’s-meetings-are-all-canceled level of happiness. We are beyond proud to have our own hefty tech book with an iconic animal on the cover. (Or, even better, iconic insect on the cover since the fine folks at O’Reilly Media agreed to let us have a cockroach on ours). Most of all, we are delighted to have the complete workings of CockroachDB collected in a single, thorough and hands-on resource to help make distributed SQL accessible to even more users. This is thanks in large part due to Guy Harrison, who is quite literally The Guy Who Wrote The Book On CockroachDB. Guy co-authored the Definitive Guide with Cockroach Labs co-founder and chief architect, Ben Darnell, and our head of education, Jesse Seldess. “Guy’s deep existing database knowledge paired with his diligence in learning Cockroach just as deeply contributed immeasurably to the scope and thoroughness of the book,” Ben commented.

Michelle Gienow

May 10, 2022

All early startups share the same first goal. No matter which sector you’re aiming to disrupt, and no matter what groundbreaking new product or service you plan to disrupt it with, your prime directive is Get to MVP. Fast. After all, until you have something that people are willing to buy, your startup is really only an idea, not a company. The pressure is on to launch your product or service as fast as possible and so embracing easy, “right enough for now” technical solutions makes sense in the early chaos of startup life. But as you start to find success — once you’ve built and launched that first crucial offering and customers start calling, once you begin hiring more teams to grow both your product and the organization that supports it — the limitations of your initial technical decisions are going to make themselves known.

Michelle Gienow

March 23, 2022

The whole world is moving faster than ever, and technology in particular feels like it’s evolving at light speed. Turning over the calendar page to a brand new year is the perfect opportunity to pause in the midst of all this tumult and get our bearings. A sense of both, What just happened??? and What happens next? grants invaluable situational awareness, so let’s take a look at what happened during 2021…But, more importantly, gaze into the Cockroach Labs crystal ball 🔮 with us for three predictions about what 2022 holds in store.

Michelle Gienow

December 20, 2021

All databases are ultimately just applications. Fundamentally, then, the definition of a serverless database is any database that embodies the core principles of a serverless application: No server management Automatic elastic scale Built-in resiliency and fault tolerance Consumption-based billing Instant access and always available

Michelle Gienow

October 28, 2021

Serverless is a crucially better way to develop and deploy, well, anything. But what actually is serverless, and what does it do for developers? Learning the four fundamental principles of serverless lets you cut through the hype to evaluate whether any tech claiming to be “serverless” is actually delivering on its promises. When first introduced, the public clouds revolutionized how quickly we can build and deploy apps, and with lower infra costs. Simply put, serverless is the next logical evolution of the cloud computing paradigm, because it enables even more efficient use of limited resources: time, money, and developer brainpower.

Michelle Gienow

October 1, 2021

Founded in 1852 during the California Gold Rush, Wells Fargo was an innovative start-up providing miners secure ways to access money and transport valuable cargo — even operating the western branch of the Pony Express to give customers the fastest possible service. In the 1990s the company once again was a pioneer in financial services innovation when it became the first US lender to provide online banking. Eventually, however, the company started to fall a bit behind the technological curve.

Michelle Gienow

September 22, 2021

Ever search for information about how to use Kubernetes? There are zillions of technical resources: docs, guides, tutorials, videos, blog posts, even cartoons. If, however, you wonder how Kubernetes is being used by different organizations and sectors, including Fortune 500s, — and what kind of workloads they use it for — “zillions” turns into “zilch.”

Michelle Gienow

August 24, 2021

Retailers often function in distributed application environments, with data squirreled away in databases around the country, or even the globe. It’s totally common to use different solutions for different workloads — for example, Cassandra for fast data reads with Oracle as the primary system of record. Often these different apps each do their specific job well, but getting them to talk to each other? Not so good.

Michelle Gienow

July 23, 2021

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that allows you to automate running and orchestrating container workloads. It is a powerful tool that offers a huge ecosystem of tools — package managers, service meshes, source plugins, monitoring tools, and more — as an abstraction layer for deploying standardized, full-stack applications across an ever-increasing range of platforms. Kubernetes is often referred to as “K8s.”

Michelle Gienow

July 14, 2021