Cockroach Labs' Bold Vision for the Future of Cloud Databases

With the announcement of its serverless database, CEO Spencer Kimball looks ahead to what's next.

Cockroach Labs, named after an insect that has evolved over 300 million years, has shared its vision of the future evolution of databases—they will be “cloud agnostic” with less complexity, more resource elasticity, and global scale.

I attended Cockroach Lab’s RoachFest last week at the company’s New York headquarters, where I talked with CEO Spencer Kimball and CMO Peter Guagenti and heard from several customers.

Founded in 2015, Cockroach Labs now has nearly 500 employees. Last December, the company announced $278M in Series F funding, raising its valuation at the time to $5 billion. CockroachDB is a SQL relational database with a distributed architecture that gives the company its name—able to survive anything, like its namesake.

A handful of customers shared how they are using CockroachDB. JP Morgan Chase uses it to offer database-as-a-service internally. At Netflix, CockroachDB is deployed within its Device Management Platform (see the case study here). Other customer speakers in…