Image Source: ChatGPT. Accessed May 30, 2025.
When your product experiences exponential growth — like ChatGPT, which reached one million users in five days — your infrastructure needs to scale just as fast. For OpenAI, that meant rethinking access control, security, and scalability across their global platform. The solution? A modern customer identity and access management (CIAM) stack built on Ory and CockroachDB.
At Cockroach Labs, we partner with companies like Ory who deliver best-in-class technologies to help enterprises build resilient, scalable, and secure applications. The success of our joint customer, OpenAI, shows what’s possible when you combine CockroachDB’s resilient, cloud-native, distributed SQL database with Ory’s modern, flexible ecosystem: unmatched developer agility and infrastructure confidence.
To learn more, watch this testimonial: "OpenAI leverages Ory to support over 400M weekly active users."
Why OpenAI Chose Ory and CockroachDB
ChatGPT's popularity and weekly active user count was growing rapidly and the engineers at OpenAI knew that they needed to make a change. With ChatGPT’s user base scaling to 400 million weekly active users as of February 2025, OpenAI needed a modern, self-hosted CIAM platform, as well as observability and increased control for optimizing the user login experience. So the OpenAI team started looking at new infrastructure requirements:
Authentication and authorization that handles global demand at thousands of logins per second
Always-on availability to ensure 24/7 login access for users
A desire for greater control over their IAM stack
The need for improved observability and modern, login user experience that drives adoption globally
CockroachDB and Ory: A Modern CIAM Stack for the Cloud Era
At Cockroach Labs, our goal has always been to build the world’s most resilient databases. Over the last 10 years, global brands have relied on CockroachDB to solve critical challenges in data distribution, scalability, and resilience. Who we choose to partner with has always reflected our core values.
CockroachDB and Ory have teamed up to help enterprises build secure, scalable, and globally distributed applications. Both of our teams are deeply committed to delivering unmatched developer agility and infrastructure confidence to our customers.
CockroachDB and Ory combine to offer:
An elastically scalable and resilient infrastructure that will survive any failure, including regional and cloud outages
Native geo-partitioning capabilities for strict data residency requirements
ACID compliance and global consistency
Global availability and low-latency with multi-region deployments
Operational simplicity to minimize overhead and increase developer productivity
Deployment Choices - Start on SaaS and evolve to self-hosted or vice-versa
Modular by design means you can use what you want and not use what you don’t
The ability to make IAM in your own vision, not your vendors: customizable UIs, workflows, and gain a path to modern standards.
Together with Ory, we deliver on the toughest demands of modern identity infrastructure:
Ready to Build for Security, Scale, and Simplicity?
The combination of Ory and CockroachDB is powering some of the world’s fastest-growing applications — like ChatGPT — by enabling developers to move fast without sacrificing security, reliability, or customer experience.
Learn more about CockroachDB at cockroachlabs.com or contact us to explore how our joint solution can accelerate your roadmap.
