CockroachDB Serverless is generally available and more product updates

When we set out to build a better relational database seven years ago, we envisioned a solution that was scalable, highly available, and always consistent, because as we said then, “we’d rather spend time quickly building and iterating products, not engineering solutions to database shortcomings.”

Today, after developing a database that delivers those capabilities and has been battle-tested by thousands of customers, we’re still following the same northstar. But we’ve extended that vision.

We believe your database should be scalable, highly available, and always consistent—without any extra work or worry from you.

We envision a world where your data-intensive applications effortlessly serve millions of customers anywhere on the planet, with the exact right capacity and locality at all times. We envision a database that’s a simple SQL API in the cloud. Just connect, and let it handle provisioning, capacity, availability, scale, and maintenance under the hood. We know that with this kind of power, every developer will more easily build what they dream.

We’re closer than ever to that vision as we make CockroachDB Serverless generally available, release a new migration toolset to let customers more easily embrace CockroachDB, and partner with critical development and infrastructure platforms.

RoachFest Keynote: CockroachDB Serverless is now generally available

Watch Chief Product Officer Nate Stewart’s keynote from RoachFest ‘22, where he announced CockroachDB Serverless.

Last October, we released CockroachDB Serverless in beta. Over the past eleven months, tens of thousands of developers have built on and battle-tested CockroachDB Serverless, and we’ve introduced a variety of advanced capabilities into the product, such as change data capture (CDC), backup and restore, a management API, and a 99.99% uptime SLA.

Today we are making it generally available. Whether you’re building your next production application, prototyping an idea, or running tests in a development environment, CockroachDB Serverless is available instantly for you.

CockroachDB Serverless is the evolution of our vision for a better database.

There’s a gap between what today’s cloud applications demand and what most databases deliver. As a developer, you have to ship code fast, make sure your applications stay online all the time, and support ever-changing scale requirements. The complex configurations of legacy databases like PostgreSQL or MySQL can limit your speed and agility.

If you’re tasked with managing infrastructure, you have to watch costs and dedicate time to database operations. Often you must over-provision and pay for extra capacity to prepare for spikes in traffic and future growth. Cloud infrastructure promises flexibility and elasticity, but ultimately you’re just renting servers.

We built a serverless version of CockroachDB to give you the relational database of the future. Like a next-generation PostgreSQL, with consumption-based, truly elastic scaling and pricing. Don’t ever worry about provisioning, deployment, maintenance, scaling, or high availability again. 

Rainmaker Games, a gaming discovery and community site, is building their platform on CockroachDB Serverless. CockroachDB Serverless has let them focus more on building their product for gamers by eliminating the manual and operational headaches that come with a traditional database. “CockroachDB Serverless has helped us get our applications up and running quicker since there’s no server to provision, nothing to install, and no replication to configure,” says Jonathan Kennell, Co-founder and CTO. “We also don’t have to worry about cluster maintenance or scaling, which traditionally are major operational concerns.”

CockroachDB Serverless lets you:

Eliminate most database operations

• Eliminate mundane operational tasks like provisioning, management and maintenance
• Eliminate complex operational tasks like scaling and configuring for high availability
• Upgrade automatically in production without downtime
• Automatically run backups every hour

Always have the right capacity and never overspend 

• Automatically handle spikes in demand without bottlenecks, and scale down to zero when there’s no demand
• Never pick server sizes again
• Never over-provision or pay for idle capacity
• Set a monthly resource limit to prevent unexpected charges
• Understand your bill each month with transparent pricing

Maximize velocity, from prototype to production

• Start instantly and for free with a fully functional relational database
• Use standard SQL capabilities and relational data structures
• Integrate with the rich ecosystem of PostgreSQL tools, ORMs and drivers
• Update schema instantly with no downtime while the database remains online
• Deploy to regions around the world
• Manage and automate operations with the cloud API

And one of the best parts of CockroachDB Serverless is the generous free tier, which lets you get started, begin prototyping, and build small applications without a credit card.

Give it a try and let us know what you think in our community Slack or Twitter. If you want to learn more about using CockroachDB Serverless, check out our free course, “Introduction to serverless databases.”

Introducing CockroachDB MOLT, our new migration toolset

Today we’re also launching CockroachDB MOLT (Migrate Off Legacy Technology), which makes it easier and faster to migrate from other databases to CockroachDB. 

Everyone knows database migrations are incredibly painful. So painful they’re often a last resort. You spend too long tethered to a database that’s just not working. When you finally decide to migrate, you’re involved in a high-stakes and stressful situation. Your application may be suffering from a scale bottleneck, downtime incidents, or technical debt. Or there’s pressure top-down to modernize your legacy systems.

CockroachDB MOLT is a new toolset built to ease your end-to-end migration journey. Named after the process of new growth in an insect’s lifecycle, MOLT provides capabilities such as automated schema conversion, schema creation, and data loading.

1. Schema conversion and creation: No more manually checking and editing your schema for compatibility with your new database. You can now create CockroachDB-compatible schema with our new schema conversion tool by uploading your existing schema and receiving line-by-line edits that you can apply with a click. 
2. Data loading: When your schema is ready in CockroachDB, you can use our new support for AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) to load your data in CockroachDB. AWS DMS is widely regarded as the easiest migration tool and it now supports CockroachDB as a target.

CockroachDB MOLT is now in preview. To learn more about how to use it, check out the docs.

Integrations with Vercel and HashiCorp

And finally, we’re releasing new integrations to let you use popular development and operational tools with CockroachDB.

With each release, we continue to add support for development tools, ORMs, and drivers to make building with CockroachDB a joy. Our new Vercel integration, now in preview, lets you take advantage of the platform to build better web experiences at the edge with CockroachDB Serverless.

CockroachDB Dedicated and serverless already automate many database operations, and with our management API you can programmatically handle additional operations like deployment, scaling, and authentication. Now you can use HashiCorp Terraform with the API to automate resource provisioning and your infrastructure workflow. This integration is in preview.

Lastly, we continue to add enterprise security capabilities to CockroachDB. We’ve rolled out HashiCorp Vault’s Dynamic Secrets for CockroachDB Dedicated and serverless to simplify the management of your database credentials & encryption keys security.

Start instantly with CockroachDB

That’s it for today’s news. If you’re excited about the idea of an on-demand relational database, give CockroachDB Serverless a try. It really is as simple as creating your cluster in 10-15 seconds and connecting. And don’t forget to stop by our community Slack or Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

Start instantly with CockroachDB»

By the way, here’s how easy it is to get started: