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InfoQ Homepage News Cockroach Labs Announces CockroachCloud, a Fully-Managed Distributed SQL Database in Beta

Cockroach Labs Announces CockroachCloud, a Fully-Managed Distributed SQL Database in Beta

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Cockroach Labs, a computer software company that develops commercial database management systems, recently announced the beta program of CockroachCloud, a fully-managed service for its CockroachDB distributed SQL database. With CockroachCloud, customers can provision, scale and manage a complex, highly available distributed SQL database within minutes.

A year ago, Cockroach Labs announced limited availability of a Managed CockroachDB - CockroachCloud. It was the first step in the cloud for the company with its Cockroach database. Since then, the company has accumulated feedback from their earliest users to evolve the offering to a broader audience today with a beta program. 

James Weitzman, director, business development and sales at Cockroach Lab, stated in a tweet:

So pumped to announce CockroachCloud! We've worked really hard @CockroachDB to build the first #DBaaS that delivers consistent, scalable SQL and brings locality to your data. All of the powers of CRDB, fully managed/hosted by us.

The CockroachCloud offering is available on AWS and GCP, with support for more public cloud providers coming soon. Furthermore, all enterprise CockroachDB features are available on CockroachCloud, such as change data capture (CDC), role-based access control (RBAC) and geo-partitioning.

In the current Cockroach User Interface, users can choose their cloud provider and region, number and size of nodes, and leave the rest to Cockroach. They will take care of the day-to-day operations of running a distributed SQL database, such as the provisioning of servers, setting up monitoring and alerting, upgrading to major and minor versions, and daily full and hourly incremental backups. 

Source: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/cockroachcloud-release/

There is a market for Cloud Database Management Systems (DBMS), according to Adam Ronthal, senior director analyst at Gartner. He stated in a Gartner blog post earlier this year in July:

Gartner numbers also show that the overall DBMS Market grew at 18.4% from 2017 to 2018 – its best growth in over a decade.  Cloud DBMS accounted for 68% of that growth.

Therefore, providing a managed database service in the cloud makes sense for Cockroach Labs. The team responsible for CockroachDB took inspiration from Google's Cloud Spanner distributed database and F1 fault tolerant distributed RDBMS. CockroachDB is also wire protocol-compliant with PostgreSQL, meaning it will not be too difficulat for a customer using PostgreSQL to replace the database with CockroachDB.

A first customer case study for leveraging CockroachCloud is now available too with Education First, an international education company that specializes in language training, educational travel, academic degree programs, and cultural exchange. This company needed to migrate to a cloud-native database to support worldwide operations in non-English speaking countries and have a resilient, multi-region database backbone for its brand-new Teachers First platform. Rocco Donnarumma, global head of infrastructure at Education First, said in the case study:

Not having to worry about troubleshooting performance issues or scalability issues brings back a lot of time to the developers so they can focus on the education platform.

As for CockroachCloud, it is not the only distributed ACID-compliant relational database in the cloud. Its competition includes Amazon's Aurora, Microsoft's SQL Azure, Azure Database for MySQL and Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and Fauna's FaunaDB

Potential CockroachCloud customers can sign up for the beta program now.

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