As we wrap up 2017, we would like to thank everyone who has contributed to and used CockroachDB and who has supported and encouraged all of us here at Cockroach Labs. This has been a great year for the product's - and company’s - evolution as we launched 1.0 then our 1.1, and are now well on our way to CockroachDB 2.0!
```Along with our 1.0 release back in May, we announced our $27M Series B raise, led by Satish Dharmaraj of Redpoint Ventures and joined by Benchmark, Firstmark Capital, GV, Index Ventures, and Work-Bench.
Around the same time, at the OpenStack Interop conference in Boston, CockroachDB was deployed live across 15 private clouds, demonstrating significant portability and flexibility.
Fast forward to October during our 1.1 launch, we excitedly announced our first public customers: Baidu, Kindred Futures, and Heroic Labs. The two releases saw an evolution in CockroachDB with:
- Significantly improved stability in the core database
- Faster performance through optimizations ranging from leaseholder rebalancing to transaction queues to faster JOINs
- Easier to use with workflows that allowing users to run distributed backup / restore quickly and safely, regardless of node failures.
Making such advances would never be possible without a fantastic team, of course. We grew 50%, from 30 to 45 employees this year, along with five co-ops.
Both our Design team and Product teams grew from one-person shows to teams of three. We established a brand new Sales team, growing from zero to three within the year. Our newly minted Head of Product (Nate Stewart), Head of Sales (Armen Kopoyan), and Head of Sales Engineering (Robert Lee) dove in head-first to bring about the advancements we can now show off proudly. If that wasn't enough, we even opened our first satellite office in Boston!
Moving into 2018, we expect CockroachDB 2.0 to exceed expectations and make its own mark. No team can ever get this far without the support of you, our users and supporters. Thank you for a great year and Happy Holidays!
