February 2021 Summaries

Cockroach Labs has released an updated version of its CockroachDB Docs site, which includes accessibility improvements, a new interactive SQL shell, and redesigned branding. The changes aim to improve the site's functionality, making it easier for users to find relevant content and test features on their browser before launching into the "real" thing. The company conducted research and analyzed other successful documentation sites to determine user needs and design solutions. Future updates may include Dark Mode, an improved search experience, and more.

CREWS (Cockroach Employees Who Support) are groups within Cockroach Labs that aim to create an inclusive environment for employees from underrepresented backgrounds. POC@CRL is a group specifically designed for people of color and their allies at the company, with a mission to build a community promoting professional and personal development and belonging through peer-led events and initiatives. Despite challenges posed by the pandemic, the group has successfully organized virtual events such as book clubs and discussions on Black History Month. They are now looking into hosting events that connect people of color in tech from outside their company. Everyone is welcome to join POC@CRL, whether they are a person of color or an ally.

Cockroach Labs, a pre-IPO company, offers equity to its interns as an incentive for them to return after graduation. The company provides direct exposure to high-impact projects and ongoing mentorship during internships. Additionally, subject to board approval, they may extend options (pre-IPO shares) to interns that will vest if they choose to return to Cockroach Labs after they graduate. This approach demonstrates the company's commitment to supporting its engineering interns in their long-term career decisions and recognizing the impact of their work even before full-time employment.

Financial services organizations are adopting cloud-native infrastructure to modernize operations and remain competitive with fintech companies. Banks have different infrastructure requirements than other industries due to the highly regulated nature of banking, critical role in global economies, and complex transaction environments. The cloud offers financial institutions benefits such as scalability, flexibility, and accessible data for timely insights. To meet fast-changing customer demands, banks are moving to cloud-native or hybrid cloud application strategies based on containers and microservices. CockroachDB is helping some of the world's largest banks transition to a cloud-first infrastructure by providing high availability, elastic scalability, and consistent transactions with low latency.

Quarano is an open-source application for epidemic management developed by a team of engineers at a government-sponsored hackathon in Germany. The app helps health departments trace the spread of COVID-19, organize quarantines, and offer health services to citizens. Built on CockroachDB, Quarano ensures secure data storage with built-in encryption and scalability for future growth. Deutsche Telekom donated hardware for hosting the application in a highly secure environment within Germany. The app is currently being used by German Health Authorities but has potential for use beyond Germany due to its open-source nature and scalable infrastructure.

Kubernetes adoption has accelerated, leading to a new approach for building and delivering software. However, stateful app management presents a challenge due to its inherent dependencies. Three paths are available for organizations using Kubernetes to orchestrate stateful apps: running outside Kubernetes, using cloud services, or running in native Kubernetes. The first option involves additional operations workload but provides maximum choice. The second option leverages cloud services and eliminates redundant infrastructure stack through external services but limits control over the database. The third option maximizes integration and automation while retaining more workload controls. Key controllers for stateful apps include StatefulSet, which manages pods with unique IDs, and DaemonSet, which ensures all nodes run a copy of a pod.

The article discusses "Stargazers," a tool for analyzing GitHub stars, which are simple ways for users to bookmark repositories that interest them. It delves into the evolution of open source projects and how GitHub has added a significant community dimension to them. The author shares insights on what drives GitHub stars, such as press mentions, contentious topics, and new content creation. Additionally, it explores the overlap in interests among stargazers and their contributions to other repositories. The article also highlights the top 15 most prolific stargazers and discusses the correlation between earlier interest in a project and more GitHub involvement.

The Danish education tech company UNIwise has successfully managed a massive increase in demand for its online test platform WISEflow during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was possible due to their fully cloud-native, scalable stack that includes Kubernetes and CockroachDB. DevOps engineers at UNIwise were able to scale infrastructure effortlessly to meet increased traffic demands across different countries in Europe and Asia. The use of CockroachDB provided the confidence that they could continue serving customers without fear of a service outage, as it is architected to withstand any outage.

CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database designed for scalability and fast applications, has expanded its feature set to include support for spatial data, materialized views, Enums, ALTER TABLE, and user-defined schema changes. These enhancements enable developers to create more expressive data models and continuously evolve them as application requirements change. CockroachDB's compatibility with Postgres-compatible SQL allows for a familiar interface while providing the benefits of a distributed database.

CockroachDB has introduced improved backup and restore capabilities into its free, open-source version. The decision was influenced by the community of CockroachDB users who emphasized the need for more support in modern data intensive applications across multiple machines. Backup and restore functionalities are crucial in a resilient database like CockroachDB, which is designed to survive disasters. These features help users recover quickly from coding accidents, protect customer data, maintain regulatory compliance with industry-specific data regulations, and take regular backups for point-in-time snapshots of the database. The backup statement allows creating full or incremental backups of a cluster's schema and data, while the restore statement restores schemas and data from a backup stored on various services.

Deploying on Kubernetes can be likened to flying with an alligator - it's manageable as long as the rules are followed, but things get complicated when scaling a highly available stateful system. This article discusses the challenges of scaling a CockroachDB Dedicated cluster using Kubernetes Statefulsets and how they were overcome by writing a custom Kubernetes scheduler plugin. The key points include understanding the constraints of Kubernetes' Statefulset, handling data redistribution and replication in stateful systems like databases, and ensuring that resources are distributed across multiple failure domains for high availability.

A global financial data firm migrated from its legacy Oracle infrastructure to CockroachDB, creating a single hybrid, geo-partitioned deployment. The firm chose CockroachDB for its flexibility and high performance, enabling a hybrid cloud deployment with low latency reads and writes. They first migrated their identity access management (IAM) system and plan to move more apps from Oracle to CockroachDB.

The article discusses building an application using Pony ORM and CockroachDB. It explains that modern database solutions support third-party tools like Pony ORM, Hibernate, GORM, jOOQ, etc., to provide flexibility in development. Pony ORM is a free Python language library for easy database interactions. The article highlights the benefits of using Pony ORM and CockroachDB together, such as simplified database operations and increased efficiency in building apps in Python. It also provides resources on how to get started with these tools and mentions other supported third-party database tools.

Distributed Tracing and Performance Monitoring in CockroachDB is a method of monitoring application performance by tracing the path of a query to identify issues that could be impacting application performance. It has been implemented in CockroachDB 20.1, following the open tracing standard. Companies like Lightstep are leading the way to simplify observability analysis for complex environments. Distributed Tracing in CockroachDB vs Lightstep differs as CockroachDB implements the open tracing standard and can use tools like Jaeger, Zipkin, and Lightstep to trace transactions within CockroachDB. A demo video is available where Senior Product Manager Piyush Singh demonstrates how to troubleshoot queries directly in the Admin UI using distributed tracing.