Cockroach Labs Unveils CockroachDB-as-a-Service on Azure and Multi-Region Serverless Platform

NEW YORK, May 16, 2023 — Cockroach Labs, the company behind the leading independent cloud-native distributed SQL database CockroachDB, today announced the realization of its vision to enable customers to run a best of breed distributed database everywhere and anywhere effortlessly. With the launch of CockroachDB-as-a-service running on Microsoft Azure in limited access, CockroachDB is now available on-demand across all three major cloud providers (with existing product availability on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform).

In addition, CockroachDB’s serverless, on-consumption data platform now allows users to read and write data across multiple geographically distributed regions. Paying only for the exact amount of data stored and usage of that data on the CockroachDB serverless platform dramatically reduces the cost of operating a global business and makes data-intensive, multi-region applications accessible to companies of any size. These additions provide customers with even greater flexibility, capability, and control in their cloud strategies, building on CockroachDB’s existing benefits of being considerably less expensive to operate than traditional scale-up systems, helping ensure a flawless customer experience through bulletproof resilience and elastic scale, and making it easy to expand into new markets.

CockroachDB as-a-Service on Microsoft Azure

Cockroach Labs’ database-as-a-service on Azure (now available in limited access) unlocks effortless resilience and scalability, operational efficiency, and easy multi-region deployments to support local performance and data compliance, all while operating on and integrating with the Microsoft ecosystem. Now, with CockroachDB dedicated for all three major clouds, users can run data-intensive applications anywhere and everywhere, effortlessly. With CockroachDB, organizations can choose between cloud providers or across multiple cloud providers, and can easily mix workloads between owned data centers and public cloud providers.

“The idea of our platform is to be able to survive a cloud vendor outage, so we’re not going to be dependent on any cloud vendor,” said Kevin Holditch, Head of Platform, Form3. “We’re going to have a Kubernetes cluster in each cloud vendor — so Azure, AWS, GCP – and run CockroachDB across the three.”

According to Gartner research, “By 2023, 40% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in cloud infrastructure and platform services, which is an increase from 20% in 2020.” And yet several surveys note up to 80% of transactional workloads have not yet moved to the cloud. That is expected to change as organizations re-evaluate their tech stack. CIO’s are prioritizing moving their most critical data into the cloud. This movement is indicative of a massive market shift that could signal the end of market dominance by legacy databases like Oracle and IBM. CockroachDB was built from the ground up to operate across any cloud and/or private cloud infrastructure while still keeping true to the consistency and durability of a traditional relational database. CockroachDB is the only cloud-independent, distributed SQL database that offers this level of flexibility and greater operational control today.

Gartner notes, “data and analytics leaders can use this research to plan against their operational use cases for relational and nonrelational cloud DBMSs, which increasingly require features for augmented operations via machine learning, multicloud scenarios and effective financial governance to achieve leadership.” Further, Gartner recommends, “select your cloud DBMS independent of the strategic cloud provider. Independent software vendors (ISVs) with multi-cloud and intercloud capability are more likely to fit best when using multiple cloud service providers (CSPs).”

Introducing CockroachDB Serverless for Global and Multi-Region Deployment

Today, Cockroach Labs also released multi-region capabilities for its consumption-based, auto-scaling offering, CockroachDB serverless. The update allows customers to distribute rows of data across multiple cloud regions, while still functioning as a single logical database and paying only for the exact storage and compute uses. With both legacy or existing cloud database solutions, the complexity and cost attached to spinning up a new region adds up very quickly. CockroachDB serverless now enables any organization to build applications that serve a globally dispersed user-base at incredibly low cost and simpler operations, opening up a global audience to companies of any size.

Enhanced Capabilities in CockroachDB MOLT (Migrate Off Legacy Technology)

Migrations require extensive technical and logistical preparation, time, energy, troubleshooting, and optimization. All the while, there’s business-level pressure to keep services online during a migration so customers don’t know that any changes happened. Today, CockroachDB MOLT now enables easier migrations from legacy databases like Oracle, Postgres, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server.

Additionally, several enhancements have been made to CockroachDB MOLT, including MOLT Verify which validates migrated data from Postgres and MySQL to ensure correct replication and a smoother syntax conversion in bulk changes, authentication of Postgres and MySQL. clusters, and more intuitive workflows.

“While the move of transactional data to the cloud is accelerating, many data leaders are still at the beginning of their cloud journey and are finding that legacy solutions simply do not meet their needs, especially for their mission-critical applications,” said Spencer Kimball, CEO and co-founder at Cockroach Labs. “This release embodies the fulfillment of the vision we set out to accomplish eight years ago. We offer true flexibility and resilience and will meet you where you are in your cloud journey–now and in the future.”

Additional feature updates released today include:

• Distributed User-Defined-Functions (UDFs): Allow developers to build UDFs into the database without running into scaling bottlenecks. Distributed UDFs increase developer and application efficiency, and enable easier migrations from legacy databases.
• Terraform provider in General Availability: Use the Terraform provider to automate provisioning and management of CockroachDB dedicated and serverless.
• Address the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2: A cryptography standard required for many government agencies and organizations that work with such agencies, with a new FIPS-ready binary for CockroachDB self-hosted.

For more information on CockroachDB on Azure, click here. To test CockroachDB serverless, click here.

About Cockroach Labs

Cockroach Labs is the creator of CockroachDB, the most highly evolved, cloud-native, distributed SQL database on the planet. Helping companies of all sizes — and the apps they develop — to scale fast, survive failures, and thrive everywhere. CockroachDB is in use at some of the world’s most successful companies across all industries, including leading companies in financial services, technology, media & entertainment, and retail. Headquartered in New York City, Cockroach Labs is backed by Altimeter, Benchmark, Greenoaks, GV, Firstmark, Index Ventures, Lone Pine, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, and Workbench.

Source: Cockroach Labs