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The world is getting weird. Increasingly epic weather events, multiplying global geopolitical uncertainties, and stubborn economic stressors make for an exceptionally unpredictable business environment. To navigate this unfortunate but unavoidable “new normal”, enterprises need a strong but flexible foundation in both business continuity and operational resilience. Aren’t these basically the same thing? Nope. It’s a common misconception that operational resilience is the more or less automatic outcome of having solid business continuity planning in place. The two are intertwined but separate: Business continuity is planning how to respond, and then recover, in the event of a given disaster (CSP outage, DDOS attack, insert your own worst nightmare scenario here…). Operational resilience means proactively building in capabilities to ensure that, if said disaster does happen, it doesn’t affect you in the first place. And both are, in their own ways, essential for an organization’s survival and success.

Michelle Gienow

Sept 25, 2023

Most SQL content on the web seems to be written with data analysts in mind. And that’s fine, but developers need SQL too! Your application is only as available and performant as your database, and solid database performance doesn’t just mean knowing how to INNER JOIN or SELECT *, it also means understanding monitoring and ops commands, using EXPLAIN ANALYZE, etc.

Charlie Custer

Sept 21, 2023

In the media and streaming industry, downtime is simply not acceptable. From the infamous Game of Thrones outages, to celebrities “breaking the internet,” to fans missing critical moments of live sporting events, these types of scenarios really upset consumers. Mux specializes in delivering a platform for developers to build high-quality live and on-demand video streaming experiences. They are focused on delivering a great experience for their impressive list of customers, which means they need a reliable, fault-tolerant infrastructure. Since 2018, Mux has been building on CockroachDB and leverages a multi-region and multi-cloud setup to achieve high availability and fast performance for Mux Video. More recently, they built a new internal service on CockroachDB that allowed them to consolidate several signing keys systems into a unified global system. Not only does this internal service improve their own developers’ productivity, it also creates a better end-user experience by responding to distributed requests in real time.

Cassie McAllister

Sept 20, 2023

According to Gartner, by 2025 over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms. It makes sense – building with cloud-native technologies can shorten development cycles and increase operational efficiency. Not only do organizations want to build on a cloud-native foundation, but they also want to have the ability to move applications and data from one cloud computing environment (public and/or private) to another with minimal disruption – also known as cloud portability. This capability helps organizations increase resilience and avoid the risks associated with cloud concentration.

Cassie McAllister

Sept 13, 2023

Reliability is your most important feature. It’s easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of planning, building, and shipping new product features. But at the end of the day, if your application isn’t available (or customers are turned away by a sluggish experience), none of those features matter.

Charlie Custer

Sept 7, 2023

Having a reliable order management system (OMS) has always been critical to a wide variety of businesses – that’s been true since the days when taking an order or an appointment meant writing information onto a piece of paper with a rotary phone handset cradled between your ear and your neck. Most businesses are taking orders and appointments in a manner that’s much less manual and much more scalable these days, thanks to the help of third-party tools that can provide plug-and-play order management systems to handle sales, orders, inventory, appointments, and much more electronically. Life is easier, and business owners might even have less neck pain. But building those third-party systems is a high-stakes endeavour for modern tech businesses like Booksy, a global digital appointment booking service that makes it easy for customers to make appointments at beauty, health, and wellness salons. Booksy is a popular service that supported nearly 100 million bookings in 2021 across 25 different countries. But it had to overcome a massive challenge to reach that scale: modernizing outdated infrastructure while growing quickly – and without harming customer satisfaction. “Google Cloud and CockroachDB are the building blocks that we use to create a globally available platform.” - Paweł Sobkowiak, CTO, Booksy

Dan Kelly

Augt 31, 2023

When it comes to payment and billing applications, not only is availability crucial, but development teams need to build idempotency into their system to guarantee data correctness.

Cassie McAllister

Augt 30, 2023

Major cloud platform outages used to be rare events. As the amount of global data increases exponentially, however (90% of the world’s data was generated in the last two years alone!) significant outages are becoming increasingly common. The potential user impact of cloud service provider (CSP) outages hits both deep and wide. For example, GCP’s europe-west9 full-region outage in April 2023 and AWS’s us-east-1 outage in June 2023 each temporarily disrupted operations for the businesses, schools, hospitals, and even government agencies relying on their services in those regions. And these are but two among many recent CSP downtime events: Data shows a steady rise in total observed global network outages in 2023 so far. The growing frequency of outages like these keeps the world’s government officials up at night. One of their deepest concerns is for the potentially catastrophic impact a major CSP failure could have on financial institutions — and the very real-world damage this could do to their economies. Concern is increasingly turning to action as different countries propose technical requirements aimed at ensuring operational resilience for their financial institutions (as well as other critical services like utilities, transportation, and healthcare). Technical requirements that are already becoming formal government regulations in some countries, with many more on the horizon. What does this mean for all organizations right now, and what can they do to prepare?

Michelle Gienow

Augt 24, 2023

[This post was originally published in October 2022. It has been updated to reflect current product offerings.] Traditionally, one of the stickiest decisions developers need to make when creating a database is choosing how many servers to use based on expected application traffic. Guess too low and your db could fall over under load, causing an outage. Guess too high, you pay for servers that just sit idle most of the time. Spiky loads? Uh oh, gotta overprovision to make sure those surges get handled even if it means wasted capacity 90%+ of the time.

Michelle Gienow

Augt 18, 2023