Cockroach Labs' RoachFest event series spanned the globe big time in 2025. We traveled from London to Bengaluru, then landed stateside for our Grand Finale: RoachFest Las Vegas!
As we expand worldwide, our mission stays laser-focused: helping organizations build systems that perform flawlessly under pressure. Enterprises of every kind depend on CockroachDB for the scale, agility, and reliability their modern applications demand.
The Las Vegas conference brought that vision to life. Data architects, developers, and technology leaders converged to share stories of database transformation, future proofing, resilience, and innovation in their production environments.
Getting connected at RoachFest 2025 in Las Vegas
Why we bet on Las Vegas 
As Cockroach Labs celebrates its tenth anniversary, hosting RoachFest in Las Vegas represents our evolution: We’ve grown from a pioneering distributed SQL startup to the trusted global partner for businesses that can’t accept downtime. The event drew professionals from fintech, AI, SaaS, gaming, and many more verticals – all solving for the same imperatives: scale, resilience, compliance, and performance, so they can future-proof without compromise.
Keynote: How do you future-proof operational data at scale?
Spencer Kimball, Co-Founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, opened RoachFest Las Vegas by spotlighting a core truth: resilience is a requirement. He introduced our Performance under Adversity framework, showing how CockroachDB is tested against real-world stress scenarios such as disk stalls, node failures, and regional outages to prove reliability beyond ideal lab conditions.
Next, Kimball shared new benchmarking data comparing CockroachDB’s global data distribution (GDD) with Oracle’s implementation on Oracle GDD v23ai free on premise, revealing that CockroachDB was 5x more resilient across multiple failure types. His keynote also looked ahead to the rise of agentic AI, which is driving even greater pressure on data systems to perform autonomously and at scale.
Kimball’s keynote turned to CockroachDB 25.3, noting how each new release raises the bar for enterprise resilience and performance. Our latest version introduces vector indexing, now in public preview, extending CockroachDB’s capabilities for AI and agentic workloads that depend on similarity search.
He also detailed enhancements to our MOLT Fetch tool, which now supports Oracle dialects for faster, de-risked migrations from legacy systems. A new Kubernetes operator simplifies deployment and scaling in cloud-native environments, while LDAP/Active Directory integration gives IT teams unified control over user management for improved compliance.
The 25.3 updates mirror our mission: Ensure CockroachDB users can modernize confidently, automate fearlessly, and keep their business-critical systems running, no matter the conditions.
Spencer Kimball, CEO and Co-Founder of Cockroach Labs, opened RoachFest Las Vegas with a keynote on resilience, performance, and the future of distributed data.
Customer stories: Real systems, real results
FanDuel: Scaling America's #1 sportsbook
When you're the #1 sportsbook in the U.S., downtime simply isn't on the table. FanDuel's Jordan Leach, Software Engineering Director, and Alex Chadwick, Staff Software Engineer, walked through how they modernized their core financial ledger – the system tracking every transaction between players and platform – by migrating to CockroachDB.
The business case: They needed speed, regulatory compliance, and the scalability to support millions of concurrent users. Today, FanDuel processes massive transaction volumes while maintaining low latency and operational confidence. Their ledger is future-proofed for new features and sustained growth.
Leach explained how forward-looking capacity planning drove their database modernization. As FanDuel projected potential legalization of online casinos in more states across the country, each state promising a new user base, they realized their existing Percona-based ledger wouldn't keep pace.
Rather than risk future product launch constraints, FanDuel explored CockroachDB early, starting with a proof of concept in 2024. Their engineers quickly saw the benefits of horizontal scaling, a sharp contrast to the vertical scaling limits that they'd been managing around. The team also re-architected their ledger, redesigning primary keys and eliminating sequential IDs that created data "hotspots," setting the stage for sustained, friction-free growth.
(l-r) FanDuel’s Alex Chadwick and Jordan Leach shared how CockroachDB powers their financial ledger with the speed, compliance, and scalability needed to serve millions of users.
Squarespace: Design meets global scale
Gavin McQuillan, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Squarespace, explained how they migrated several use cases from PostgreSQL to CockroachDB to meet customer performance expectations.
With millions of active users worldwide, Squarespace's platform must deliver consistently fast performance and zero downtime. CockroachDB lets their engineers focus on innovation by building new features and optimizing user experience, rather than wrestling with infrastructure. The result: a reliable, globally distributed foundation that mirrors Squarespace's design philosophy of being simple on the surface, powerful underneath.
McQuillan shared how his team gained both flexibility and visibility by moving critical workloads to CockroachDB. One of the biggest advantages has been configuring data locality dynamically, without embedding complex regional logic into the schema itself. Instead of mapping out multi-region deployments with complex schema updates, Squarespace can change data placement dynamically as their global footprint grows.
This approach simplifies operations while keeping applications lightweight and adaptable. McQuillan noted that the CockroachDB Console has become their "daily driver," offering deep insights into cluster health and even the performance of specific application paths. Engineers can now trace latency variations to particular API endpoints and resolve issues proactively. This is visibility they simply didn't have before. (Learn more about Squarespace’s CockroachDB experience in their case study, Leveraging Change Data Capture For Database Migrations At Scale.)
Squarespace’s Gavin McQuillan, Senior Staff Software Engineer, described how migrating from PostgreSQL to CockroachDB improved global performance and simplified operations.
Cisco AI Defense: Resilience for the AI era
Arjun Sambamoorthy, Co-Founder, Chief Architect & Head of Engineering at Cisco AI, described their journey from PostgreSQL to CockroachDB while developing a new AI-driven platform for enterprise security.
The challenge was daunting: scale to serve over 100,000 tenants and 50 million+ tables while maintaining strict security and compliance. CockroachDB provided a distributed, fault-tolerant data layer capable of meeting the use case’s regulatory and performance demands.
By modernizing their data architecture, the engineers were able to iterate faster, strengthen compliance, and deliver end-to-end AI protection for enterprise customers. Sambamoorthy described how the new suite of Cisco AI products – AI Defense, AI Canvas, and AI Assistant – runs on CockroachDB to handle data at global scale.
Each application generates enormous volumes of prompt and response traffic between user-facing applications and large language models. Cisco stores that conversational data in CockroachDB, maintaining consistent history across thousands of enterprise customers. To support model retraining and continuous learning, Cisco enabled change data capture (CDC) pipelines feeding data into both Snowflake and Databricks. Snowflake powers the retraining of safety and security models for AI Defense, while Databricks supports AI Canvas' generative and visualization workloads.
By moving from PostgreSQL to a distributed, active-active CockroachDB architecture, Cisco AI eliminated scaling bottlenecks, simplified DevOps operations, and created a unified foundation for their rapidly expanding AI ecosystem.
Arjun Sambamoorthy, Co-Founder, Chief Architect & Head of Engineering at Cisco AI, detailed how CockroachDB underpins their global, AI-driven security platform with scale and compliance.
Kelsey Hightower keynote: Lessons from 20+ years of building systems that outlast the chaos
The energy elevated even higher when Kelsey Hightower, former Google Cloud Distinguished Engineer and open source advocate, took the stage for his keynote. Drawing on two decades of systems engineering experience, he illuminated what real production environments teach us about simplicity, trust, and human-centered design.
Hightower’s message was inspirational. He emphasized that technology evolves, but the need for dependable, adaptable systems that are empathic to their operators never changes. His stories of scaling up and down confidently underscored the shared mission between Cockroach Labs and the engineers who rely on us: build resilient systems.
Kelsey Hightower, former Google Cloud Distinguished Engineer, shared lessons from two decades of building resilient systems and the human-centered design behind them.
Innovation in action: Building for performance at scale
Rohan Joshi, Product Manager at Cockroach Labs, closed the technical sessions with a deep dive into CockroachDB's latest enterprise capabilities.
Joshi shared compelling reasons about why organizations must migrate databases, instead of enduring the limitations of their legacy implementations. He also showcased the latest migration tooling for Oracle that simplifies modernization journeys, plus automation advancements that make scaling in Kubernetes environments faster and safer. Each enhancement serves our goal of empowering developers to successfully build, deploy, and grow.
Rohan Joshi, Product Manager at Cockroach Labs, showcased new enterprise capabilities in CockroachDB 25.3 that simplify migrations, automation, and scaling in cloud environments.
Community & culture worldwide
If RoachFest Bengaluru and RoachFest London celebrated global momentum, Las Vegas brought it home. Our Sin City stop honored the U.S. developer and customer community that helped Cockroach Labs grow from startup to global leader.
Through networking sessions, coffee chats, and a celebratory closing reception, attendees exchanged insights on scaling applications, optimizing data performance, and navigating the AI era. From startups to industry giants, there was a common thread: Resilience isn't just built into CockroachDB, it's built into the people who use it.
RoachFest Las Vegas was a day of learning, conversations, connections, and celebrations!
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