Cockroach Labs scores $160M Series E on $2B valuation

https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/12/cockroach-labs-scores-160m-series-e-on-2b-valuation/

by derekperkins • 6 years ago

5 8 6 years ago

I don't really understand the continuing appeal for CockroachDB. Yes there is some cool tech, but given that all transactions are synchronously distributed, there's a hard cap on how fast it can be. I have yet to see any significant case studies about real workloads, while their competitors like Vitess are seeing whole-scale adoption from their users - including Slack and HubSpot.

vvern3• 6 years ago

I'm not sure I understand this. Vitess performs synchronous replication to at least two nodes for all write IIUC. The point that I think you're making is that Vitess generally does that in a single region so, for a given write, you see single-region latency. Cockroach can do this too. In fact, in very similar terms. Cockroach allows data to be partitioned and then partitions can be configured with placement constraints, including which regions to place the data. At the end of the day, for queries which touch the equivalent of one shard, you can configure cockroach to experience a latency profile comparable to Vitess.

Additionally, cockroach offers the ability to survive regional failures, and, likely most importantly, it allows you to perform arbitrary, serializable cross-shard transactions. Vitess has some sort of 2PL transaction thing but last time I heard Sugu talk about it, he said something like, nobody uses it.

derekperkins4• 6 years ago

Since I'm not a Cockroach expert, I'm sure that there are ways to configure it that eliminate some of those latency issues that were common early on. Both Vitess & Cockroach can replicate across regions and survive regional failures.

As for cross-shard transactions, that's mainly what I'm referring to about slowness. Vitess does have 2PC, but as you mention, almost nobody uses it in production. Companies using Vitess architect their data and sharding patterns so that cross-shard transactions aren't necessary. There are definitely cases where that is part of the requirement, but in far fewer cases than many people think.

At the end of the day, I'm still waiting to see any major tech company push serious workloads onto Cockroach. Until that happens at scale, and as I continue to see more and more of those major companies adopting Vitess, it's going to be hard to convince me that Cockroach solves all the problems that they claim to. What they are fantastic at is great docs and beautiful interfaces, both of which are lacking on the Vitess side. :)

Cockroach Labs scores $160M Series E on $2B valuation

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