Cockroach Labs

Cockroach Labs
Software
Founded 2014
Founder Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, Ben Darnell
Headquarters New York City
Key people
 Spencer Kimball, CEO
Peter Mattis, VP of Engineering
Ben Darnell, CTO
Website www.cockroachlabs.com

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]

See also

References

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 1 2 Babcock, Charles (4 June 2015). "CockroachDB: Ultimate in Database Survival". Information Week. Retrieved 24 July 2015.
  5. ↑ Darfler, Benjamin (29 August 2014). "CockroachDB: A Scalable, Geo-Replicated, Transactional Datastore". InfoQ. Retrieved 25 July 2015.
  6. ↑ Metz, Cade (10 July 2012). "Google Remakes Online Empire with Colossus". Wired. Retrieved 12 August 2015.
  7. ↑ Wauters, Robin (28 July 2009). "Steal! Ben Darnell Leaves Google Reader Team, Joins FriendFeed". TechCrunch. Retrieved 24 July 2015.
  8. ↑ Ewbank, Kay. "CockroachDB Released". I Programmer. Retrieved 25 July 2015.
  9. 1 2 "Open Source Rookies of the Year". Black Duck Software. Retrieved 25 July 2015.
  10. ↑ "These are the hottest new open source projects right now". Wired. 28 January 2015. Retrieved 25 July 2015.
  11. ↑ Finley, Klint (22 July 2014). "CockroachDB is the resilient cloud software built by ex-Googlers". Wired.co.UK. Retrieved 25 July 2015.
  12. 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.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/2/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.