Until recently, databases had to be created through a request to provision. Someone had to file a ticket and approve the request. An engineer had to size the cluster in advance according to a worst-case estimate on peak capacity, and then pay for 85-95% idle capacity for every moment that peak was not in evidence.
Earlier this year, we rolled out a platform for agentic-coded app development and hosting. It ended up being our own microcosm of the SaaS-apocalypse. Programmers at Cockroach Labs use it. So do people who have never written a line of code. In just two months, 500 people launched more than 1,000 applications—most with a database behind them. In a single internal group, active databases went from 13 in March to 392 in July. Total cost to the org? $250.
That efficiency comes from multi-tenancy and cluster virtualization, capabilities we’ve spent five years developing and refining through our serverless database offering. Today we launched Cockroach Continuum bringing that same power to the enterprise with private virtual clusters.
Where the seams were
Most database architectures have a cliff. Outgrow a monolithic instance and you reach for manual sharding or upgrade to a distributed database. Outgrow a shared tier and you migrate to a dedicated instance or cluster. Need a second region and you deploy a second service, or else re-architect from the ground up. Each cliff is a project, and projects are most often paid for in quarters (if you’re lucky).
Continuum has no cliff. A thousandth of a core on a shared host, or a dedicated cluster carrying one mission-critical system across thousands of cores – each with the same database, same operations, same SQL, and the same guarantees. Continuum lets you own your database cloud, and the economics come from three capabilities that make it work.
Cluster virtualization. Thousands of well-isolated, virtual clusters on one distributed system, sharing capacity that would otherwise sit idle. Load peaks and troughs aggregate. Utilization can climb towards 50 percent across the physical cluster. An individual workload can scale from zero in milliseconds, without any required sizing. At any point, a workload can consume what it needs, from a fraction of a vCPU up to the size of the physical cluster.
Cockroach Plenum, our disaggregated storage substrate, sold alongside Continuum. Storage and compute scale independently, and Plenum bills on what you actually store.
Aegis, our agentic operations layer. It watches every cluster in the estate, around the clock, and it reads the slow-query logs nobody has opened in two years. At launch Aegis is advisory: it diagnoses and recommends, and your team approves. This is a second pair of eyes, and provides defense in depth.
Easy to claim, hard to build
The AI era is precipitating broad attempts at convergence in the database ecosystem. Analytics vendors are moving into transactions. Serverless databases are moving upmarket. Legacy engines are bolting on AI. But state-of-the-art resilience and correctness, with elastic scale-up to petabytes, require an architecture that takes years to get right.
CockroachDB supports systems that cannot go down: banks, trading systems, brokerages, and satellite communications. These are use cases where an outage means lost revenue, fines and brand-eroding headlines. We run some of the world’s largest OLTP workloads, and support use cases with customer data spread across countries and even continents. And we run everywhere you run – the public cloud, the private cloud, BYOC, and self-hosted.
Continuum is CockroachDB for the database estate, built to support the rapid proliferation of agent-built applications and agentic workloads. With virtualization and Plenum storage, customer economics achieve greater efficiencies at fleet scale. Aegis further addresses the significant cost of human operations, allowing the same human team to operate a much larger estate.
The days of filing a ticket to provision a database are history. Always paying for every workload’s worst-case peak traffic is hopelessly legacy. Now the database capacity is there when an agent reaches for it or a workload requires it – from a thousandth of a core to ten thousand. Cockroach Continuum is available now. Learn more →
