This article is co-authored by David Joy, Senior Sales Staff Engineer for Cockroach Labs, Harsh Shah, Staff Sales Engineer for Cockroach Labs, and Krishnaswamy Venkataraman, Technical Specialist – Azure for Microsoft.
Welcome to our new blog series, Unlocking Enterprise Scale with CockroachDB on Microsoft Azure. We'll explore how CockroachDB, our cloud-native distributed SQL database, can be leveraged on Microsoft Azure to achieve unprecedented scalability, resilience, and performance for enterprise applications.
We will dive into best practices, real-world use cases, and step-by-step guides to help you harness the full potential of CockroachDB on Azure, enabling your organization to handle massive workloads, ensure data integrity, and drive innovation. Whether you're an architect or database administrator or developer, or business leader, this series will provide valuable insights to transform your data infrastructure and empower your enterprise.
Visit the second article in this series, "Deploying on Microsoft Azure", and the third article "Operating CockroachDB on Microsoft Azure."
CockroachDB in the Enterprise Azure Ecosystem
In today's dynamic business environment, enterprises demand robust, scalable, and resilient database solutions to support their mission-critical applications. As organizations increasingly migrate to the cloud, Microsoft Azure is a leading platform, offering a comprehensive suite of tools and services to drive innovation and efficiency. Within this ecosystem, CockroachDB stands out as a powerful, cloud-native distributed SQL database designed to meet the rigorous demands of modern enterprise.
All cloud providers have some distinct advantage for their users; Azure specifically leads the way with a larger global footprint of data center regions than other providers, which is beneficial for businesses that require local data residency and low-latency access in diverse geographical locations.
For enterprises embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem seeking improved resilience, global presence with strong consistency, and compliance, a combination of CockroachDB with Azure cloud is a compelling choice for innovation and scale. For Azure customers, CockroachDB has several deployment options that provide a strategic advantage in building and managing robust, high-performance applications.
Another benefit to Azure users is the ability to procure CockroachDB through the Azure Marketplace. By purchasing through the Azure Marketplace, organizations can apply the cost of CockroachDB towards their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), effectively reducing their overall spending commitments. This not only simplifies the billing process but also maximizes the value derived from their existing Azure agreements.
Whether you're developing a global e-commerce platform, a financial services application, or a real-time analytics solution, CockroachDB on Azure provides the reliability and flexibility needed to succeed in today's competitive landscape.
Use Cases for CockroachDB on Azure
Global Scale Applications: Enterprises with applications requiring global availability and low latency while also requiring strong data consistency can benefit from CockroachDB's distributed nature. It ensures data is close to the users, no matter where they are located. For example, a global e-commerce platform can provide fast and consistent reads / writes to support users by deploying CockroachDB across multiple Azure regions.
Regulatory Compliance: Businesses needing to comply with data sovereignty laws can configure CockroachDB to store data in specific regions, ensuring adherence to local regulations. This is particularly important for industries such as finance, where data privacy and security are paramount.
Disaster Recovery and High Availability: CockroachDB's ability to replicate data across multiple nodes and regions makes it ideal for applications requiring high availability and robust disaster recovery solutions. With CockroachDB users do not need to be concerned with planning disaster recovery environments or blue green deployment. CockroachDB’s masterless architecture is ideal for enterprises and use cases who expect 100% service continuity even in the event of regional outages.
Modernizing legacy applications: Organizations are increasingly migrating from traditional databases like MySQL and SQL Server to modern, cloud-native databases such as CockroachDB. This trend is driven by the need for greater scalability, improved performance, and enhanced resilience. CockroachDB's compatibility with SQL and its ability to run on Azure's infrastructure make it an attractive option for enterprises looking to modernize their database architecture.
Multi-Cloud Strategies: Many are adopting multi-cloud strategies to avoid vendor lock-in and improve resilience. CockroachDB's compatibility with multiple cloud platforms, including Azure, makes it a versatile choice for multi-cloud environments.
Financial Services: In industries like banking and finance, where consistency and transactional integrity are crucial, CockroachDB on Azure provides a reliable platform for critical applications. It can handle high transaction volumes and ensure data accuracy, essential for applications like online banking and trading platforms.
CockroachDB also leverages a suite of Azure services to enhance its capabilities, providing a robust, scalable, and secure environment suitable for retail and financial services. Here are some key integrations:
Azure VMs: CockroachDB can be deployed on Azure Virtual Machines, offering flexible and scalable computing capabilities that match CockroachDB's resource demands.
Azure Premium Storage: Utilizing Azure Premium Storage, CockroachDB ensures high-performance and low-latency disk access, crucial for database operations requiring quick data retrieval and efficient transaction processing.
Azure Blob Storage for Backups: CockroachDB integrates with Azure Blob Storage to manage database backups. This service provides reliable, scalable storage infrastructure that ensures data durability and high availability.
Azure KMS for Encrypted Backups: To secure backups, CockroachDB uses Azure Key Management Service (KMS) for encryption, helping meet compliance and security requirements by protecting backup data with industry-standard encryption protocols.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): CockroachDB on AKS benefits from managed Kubernetes services, simplifying container orchestration and scaling. This integration helps automate deployment, scaling, and operations of CockroachDB clusters.
Azure PrivateLink (Preview): Azure PrivateLink provides private connectivity from Azure virtual networks to CockroachDB, enhancing security by keeping network traffic within the Azure network and away from the public internet.
Azure Synapse via CockroachDB Changefeeds: CockroachDB's changefeeds can stream data changes directly into Azure Synapse, enabling real-time analytics and data warehousing capabilities. This allows enterprises to derive insights from live operational data, enhancing decision-making processes.
Get started by launching your very own CockroachDB Cluster on Azure.
Stay tuned for the next parts of this series, where we will dive deeper into the architecture, technical and operational fundamentals for running CockroachDB on Azure along best practices to consider when deploying CockroachDB on Microsoft Azure. Unlock the full potential of your enterprise data strategy with CockroachDB and Azure.
