Cockroach Labs
 | |
| Software | |
| Founded | 2014 |
| Founder | Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, Ben Darnell |
| Headquarters | New York, New York, USA |
Key people |
Spencer Kimball, CEO Peter Mattis, VP of Engineering Ben Darnell, CTO |
| Website |
www |
Cockroach Labs is a computer software company that develops infrastructure solutions for businesses.[1] It is best known for CockroachDB, a database that has been compared to Google's Spanner database.[2] CockroachDB is an open-sourced software project that is designed to store copies of data in multiple locations in order to deliver requested data when needed.[3][4] It is described as a scalable, consistently-replicated, transactional datastore.[5]
History
Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015 by ex-Google employees Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell. Prior to Cockroach Labs, Kimball and Mattis were key members of the Google Colossus team[6] while Darnell was a key member of the Google Reader team.[7] While at Google, all three had previously used BigTable and were acquainted with its successor, Spanner.[2] After leaving Google, they wanted to design and build something similar for companies outside of Google. By June 2015, the company had nine engineers working on its CockroachDB software.[3]
Spencer Kimball wrote the first iteration of the design in January 2014 and began the open source project on GitHub in February 2014, allowing outside access and contributions.[8] It attracted a community of experienced contributors, with the co-founders also actively developing the project with conferences, networking, and meet-ups.[9] Its collaborations on GitHub earned it the honor of Open Source Rookie of the Year, a title awarded by Black Duck Software to the top new open source projects.[9][10]
In June 2015, the company closed $6.25 million in funding from Benchmark, Sequoia, Google Ventures, and FirstMark Capital.[2] As a result of the funding, Benchmark's general partner Peter Fenton was named to the company's board of directors.[3] Additional investors in the funding round were disclosed as Hortonworks chief executive Rob Bearden, CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi, and Cloudera co-founder Jeff Hammerbacher.[1]
Software
Cockroach Lab's main software is CockroachDB, an open source database built using a Google whitepaper on Spanner.[2] The database is scalable in that a single instance can be run from a laptop while building an app, then scaled to thousands of commodity servers as a business grows.[2] CockroachDB is designed to run in the cloud and be resilient to failures.[11] The name is taken from the insect that can withstand death from many conventional methods.[12] In an interview with Wired Magazine, co-founder Spencer Kimball stated, "the name is representative of its two most important qualities: survivability, of course, and the ability to spread to the available hardware in an almost autonomous sense."[12] CockroachDB is open-source software that is designed to store copies of data in multiple locations in order to deliver requested data when needed.[3] The result is a database that is described as almost impossible to take down.[12][4]
References
- 1 2 Ovide, Shira (4 June 2015). "CockroachDB Scampers Off With $6.3 Million to Tackle Database Shortcomings". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 24 July 2015.
- 1 2 3 4 5 Finley, Klint (4 June 2015). "Ex-Googlers Get Millions to Help Build the Next Google". Wired. Retrieved 24 July 2015.
- 1 2 3 4 Novet, Jordan (4 June 2015). "Peter Fenton's latest investment is a database startup called Cockroach". VentureBeat. Retrieved 24 July 2015.
- 1 2 Babcock, Charles (4 June 2015). "CockroachDB: Ultimate in Database Survival". Information Week. Retrieved 24 July 2015.
- ↑ Darfler, Benjamin (29 August 2014). "CockroachDB: A Scalable, Geo-Replicated, Transactional Datastore". InfoQ. Retrieved 25 July 2015.
- ↑ Metz, Cade (10 July 2012). "Google Remakes Online Empire with Colossus". Wired. Retrieved 12 August 2015.
- ↑ Wauters, Robin (28 July 2009). "Steal! Ben Darnell Leaves Google Reader Team, Joins FriendFeed". TechCrunch. Retrieved 24 July 2015.
- ↑ Ewbank, Kay. "CockroachDB Released". I Programmer. Retrieved 25 July 2015.
- 1 2 "Open Source Rookies of the Year". Black Duck Software. Retrieved 25 July 2015.
- ↑ "These are the hottest new open source projects right now". Wired. 28 January 2015. Retrieved 25 July 2015.
- ↑ Finley, Klint (22 July 2014). "CockroachDB is the resilient cloud software built by ex-Googlers". Wired.co.UK. Retrieved 25 July 2015.
- 1 2 3 Finley, Klint (21 July 2014). "Out in the Open: Ex-Googlers Building Cloud Software That's Almost Impossible to Take Down". Wired. Retrieved 24 July 2015.