Headquarters New York City CEO Spencer Kimball Type of business Software | Website www.cockroachlabs.com Founded 2014 | |
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Key people Spencer Kimball, CEO
Peter Mattis, VP of Engineering
Ben Darnell, CTO Founders Ben Darnell, Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis | ||
Spencer kimball cockroach labs a new kind of database hosted by firstmark capital
Cockroach Labs is a computer software company that develops database management systems for businesses. It is best known for CockroachDB, which has been compared to Google's Spanner database. 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. It is described as a scalable, consistently-replicated, transactional datastore.
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Cockroachdb architecture overview from cockroach labs code driven by firstmark
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 while Darnell was a key member of the Google Reader team. While at Google, all three had previously used BigTable and were acquainted with its successor, Spanner. 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.
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. It attracted a community of experienced contributors, with the co-founders also actively developing the project with conferences, networking, and meet-ups. 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.
In June 2015, the company closed $6.25 million in funding from Benchmark, Sequoia, Google Ventures, and FirstMark Capital. As a result of the funding, Benchmark's general partner Peter Fenton was named to the company's board of directors. Additional investors in the funding round were disclosed as Hortonworks chief executive Rob Bearden, CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi, and Cloudera co-founder Jeff Hammerbacher.
Software & Features
Cockroach Lab's main software is CockroachDB, an open source database built using a Google whitepaper on Spanner. 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.
CockroachDB is designed to run in the cloud and be resilient to failures. The name is taken from the cockroach insect that can withstand death from many conventional methods. CockroachDB is open-source software that is designed to store copies of data in multiple locations in order to deliver requested data when needed. The result is a database that is described as "almost impossible" to take down. Even if multiple servers or an entire datacenter were to go offline, CockroachDB would aim to keep services online.