*June 2023 Update - As of CockroachDB 23.1 our serverless deployment now has multi-region capabilities. You can read more detail in our documentation.
A year ago the leaves were turning and we wrote, “serverless databases are the future”. Well, now serverless databases are the present. It’s true that the serverless database will continue to mature towards its eventual destiny as an API endpoint in the cloud. But the serverless version of CockroachDB is now generally available with advanced capabilities like change data capture (CDC), backup and restore, a management API, and a 99.99% uptime SLA.
In this blog, we’ll focus on two examples of serverless applications in production on CockroachDB Serverless today. It’s important to note that truly serverless applications must have a serverless front end and back end.
Rainmaker Games: A serverless discovery and community website
“We’re running our gaming discovery and community site, Rainmaker Games, on CockroachDB Serverless with NodeJS and Prisma. The serverless stack has helped us get our apps up and running quicker since there’s no server to provision, nothing to install, and no replication to configure. We also don’t have to worry about cluster maintenance or scaling, which traditionally are major operational concerns. CockroachDB Serverless enables us to focus on building a platform that empowers gamers to play and invest smarter by eliminating the manual and operational headaches that come with a traditional database”. - Jonathan Kennell, Co-founder and CTO, Rainmaker Games
Rainmaker games is an interactive inventory of games and NFTs. It’s also a website platform where the community can connect and discuss the inventory. They host a blog with content that introduces new games and they offer the ability for users to submit new games and NFTs.
TIMU: A serverless collaboration platform
“CockroachDB Serverless entirely eliminated a lot of manual scaling work that’s hard to get right, so long term it saves us a lot of time. It also reduces operational costs since we don’t have to overprovision, especially when we are in beta.” -Jesse Ezell, CTO and Co-Founder of TIMU
Think of TIMU like a combination of Google Meet, Slack, Trello, and Google Drive. It offers video conferencing, chat, project management dashboards, and file sharing. TIMU is in beta right now, and CockroachDB Serverless allows them to prepare for scale without overspending ahead of time.
Start building with serverless architecture
The ease of getting started with CockroachDB Serverless is perhaps best demonstrated by my colleague’s mom (a french teacher). Watch how effortlessly she starts a cluster (without any knowledge of what a cluster is!):
The ease of getting started with serverless is important. But what’s equally useful to keep in mind is that serverless architecture is built to grow with you. When Rainmaker Games hits a massive spike in traffic or TIMU gets adopted by a huge organization the database will scale automatically to accommodate the data, and it will remain resilient.
For more information about CockroachDB Serverless check out the following links:
• When to use a serverless database
• How we built a free serverless sql database
• How to deploy CockroachDB Serverless with Google Cloud Run
