The love for Namma Bengaluru goes beyond words for Cockroach Labs – a software company that creates cloud-native SQL databases which has cemented its roots in India since its arrival years ago. With its growing team of over 55 engineers, including specialists in database and cloud engineering, the company’s journey in India is more than strategic; it’s emotional.
“India’s unmatched technical talent and entrepreneurial mindset make Bengaluru a perfect fit for our mission,” said Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO, in a recent conversation with AIM as he reflected on the city’s pivotal role in the company’s global vision.
This connection with Bengaluru is also deeply strategic. Cockroach Labs has found the city to be the ideal hub for scaling operations across the Asia-Pacific region. Bengaluru provides unparalleled time-zone advantages and access to a rich talent pool.
With 1.4 billion people and a rapidly digitising economy, India is a proving ground for resilience and scalability. “The demands of Indian enterprises, across sectors like banking, media, and logistics, align perfectly with CockroachDB’s strengths in handling scale and regulatory requirements,” Kimball added.
From Google Roots to Cockroach Resilience
The inception of Cockroach Labs is a story of necessity and innovation. Kimball, alongside co-founders Ben Darnell and Peter Mattis, spent a decade at Google (2002-2012) working on pioneering projects like Gmail, Google Reader, and Colossus – Google’s distributed storage system. Their experience at Google shaped their understanding of the need for resilient and distributed systems.
“Google had low-cost infrastructure, wasn’t reliable, so they built very redundant, distributed infrastructure. And when we were at Google in that period, we saw the advent of Bigtable… [Google] quickly followed Bigtable, and they called [it] MegaStore, which introduced an idea of transactions… and then that eventually led to Spanner,” recalled Kimball in another interview.
However, after leaving Google, the trio faced firsthand challenges while building their startup, Viewfinder. The absence of a transactional distributed database forced them to use DynamoDB, leading to inefficiencies and workarounds.
“..We had to use DynamoDB, but DynamoDB without transactions 2012 to 2014. Well, we wished we had them. We spent maybe a third of our engineering time working around that problem,” Kimball said.
This frustration led to the birth of Cockroach Labs in 2014, with a vision to create an open-source, cloud-native distributed database. “…And it was the capabilities of Spanner, which people probably heard about these days because they wrote a big paper about it …that tied the best things together of relational databases, the more traditional ideas of consistency and concurrency management. And then also there’s no SQL, which is extremely elastic, least scalable…..the idea of Cockroach, to be an open source, fast follow on Google’s internal technology, lived on.,” he added.
Towards Resilience & Scale
True to its name, CockroachDB has built its reputation on resilience, a feature that has drawn comparisons to industry heavyweights like Google Spanner and Amazon Aurora. The database’s unique ability to run seamlessly across cloud providers, private data centres, and hybrid setups makes it a standout choice.
Kimball also noted their focus is on eliminating vendor lock-in, ensuring businesses can operate uninterrupted, even in the face of cloud or data centre outages. This adaptability has made Cockroach Labs the operational backbone for global giants like Netflix and ambitious startups like Fi.
Unlike competitors such as MySQL Cluster and MariaDB Xpand, CockroachDB’s architecture allows businesses to handle elasticity, resilience, and cross-cloud data sovereignty without compromise.
Kimball emphasised that they are more than just a database—they are a partner in tackling scalability challenges over decades of growth. He highlighted the company’s distinctive focus on both startups and enterprise customers, providing a seamless pathway for businesses to scale effectively.
Building a Future from Bengaluru
Cockroach Labs isn’t resting on its laurels. The company has ambitious plans to expand its Bengaluru office into a first-class R&D hub to tackle the hardest technical challenges in database engineering. Teams here are working on innovations like vector data integration for AI in order to enable operational databases to evolve into systems capable of real-time intelligence.
“India’s environment is perfect for not only engineering excellence but also go-to-market strategies tailored for enterprises,” Kimball further said.
As AI reshapes the industry, Cockroach Labs is ready to lead the charge. The company is investing heavily in AI-specific features, including support for vector similarity searches and operationalising AI workflows.
Reflecting on plans for the next decade, Kimball concluded, “We think of ourselves not as an N plus one incremental database that you’re adding, but as an N divided by two. This is where you’re going to shrink your databases over the next 10 years.”
With its foundations in Bengaluru and an eye on the global stage, Cockroach Labs is poised to make its mark with remarkable impact in the years ahead.
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