India's technology ecosystem is scaling faster than ever, with remarkable momentum. The country's economy grew at a faster-than-expected 7.8% annual rate in the quarter ending June 2025. Meanwhile, digital commerce alone is projected to quadruple from $160 billion in 2025 to $640 billion by 2035 powered by internet penetration, smartphone adoption, and ambitious government initiatives.
Against this dynamic backdrop, fintechs process billions in daily transactions while digital commerce platforms serve hundreds of millions of users. The demand for resilient, always-on infrastructure has reached a tipping point, and now Cockroach Labs has brought our annual RoachFest event series to Bengaluru for the first time.
This wasn't just our India debut: It marked the first RoachFest east of London, our third continent, and a milestone for our expanding global community. Engineers, architects, and business leaders gathered for a full day of hands-on workshops, real-world case studies, and strategic discussions about building systems that don't just survive pressure, they thrive under it.
Why did we bring RoachFest25 to Bengaluru?
Bengaluru is the center of an exploding tech landscape, which is a big reason why we chose this thriving hub as our home base in India. Fintech, e-commerce, SaaS, and digital-first companies are all scaling aggressively, creating urgent demand for resilient, cloud-native databases.
For Cockroach Labs, celebrating our 10th anniversary throughout 2025, Bengaluru is a new chapter in distributed SQL database adoption. It’s a fast-moving metropolis embodying the RoachFest25 themes of heightened scale, agility, innovation, and performance. Our time in India followed a successful London RoachFest in June, with the third and final edition set to land in Las Vegas on October 14th.
Spencer Kimball, our Co-Founder and CEO, drove this point home in his keynote: Modern databases don't get to operate in perfect lab conditions. They face the real-world chaos of flaky infrastructure, traffic spikes, regulatory complexity, AI-driven workloads, and multi-region demands. These are the exact conditions where CockroachDB proves its worth with unmatched resilience.
Gearing up for a big day in Bengaluru.
Builder Track: Getting Hands-On with CockroachDB
The morning Builder Track gave attendees direct access to CockroachDB engineers and technical evangelists. Workshops were overseen by yours truly, Cockroach Labs Technical Evangelist Rob Reid, covering everything from distributed SQL fundamentals to consensus and replication, with common scenarios like node failures and cluster rebalancing.
Participants built their own CockroachDB clusters, stress-tested them, and watched data redistribute while consistency held firm even as components failed. This captured the essence of what we do for data architects: underpin systems that don’t go down.
RoachFest’s unique energy builds on breakthroughs like this, as developers hit a-ha! moments that only hands-on experience can deliver. Watching queries reroute seamlessly, even while hardware fails underneath, reinforced why teams trust CockroachDB for their most critical workloads.
Cockroach Labs Technical Evangelist Rob Reid led the hands-on Builder Track.
Outcomes Track: Real Stories, Real Scale
The evening Outcomes Track showcased business leaders that are building advanced architectures on CockroachDB. These sessions demonstrated how distributed SQL drives genuine transformation at massive scale.
Yubi: Powering India's Debt Revolution
Bharat Krishnamurthy, CTO of Yubi, walked through how India's largest debt marketplace handles 10x transactional growth on their YubiOS platform using CockroachDB. By maintaining cloud neutrality and compliance readiness while preparing for geographic expansion, Yubi showed how the right data foundation enables both innovation and regulatory success.
Krishnamurthy’s presentation painted a picture of real-time financial infrastructure operating at extraordinary volume. Their debt marketplace processes 150,000 loan applications daily, with 87,000 to 100,000 of those turning into actual disbursements. The performance bar? A p99 of 9 seconds from application to money in the customer's account, though many users see funds arrive in just 2.5 seconds.
These metrics reflect the operational reality of running a high-volume financial platform. When you're processing this much money at this speed, database reliability is no longer simply a non-functional requirement, it’s mission critical. Any performance degradation directly impacts customer experience and business outcomes. The search for consistent performance under heavy load is what led Yubi to choose CockroachDB as their infrastructure foundation.
Bharat Krishnamurthy, CTO of Yubi, explained their intensive data infrastructure requirements.
Global Payments: Subsecond Performance Worldwide
As a multinational fintech processing over 32 billion card transactions annually, Global Payments demands subsecond latencies and bulletproof compliance. Jess Tays, Executive Director of Data Management, shared how CockroachDB helped transform a legacy system into a multi-region, cloud-native architecture that sets new performance and reliability standards.
Tays walked RoachFest Bengaluru attendees through the journey from legacy infrastructure to a modern, cloud-native foundation. Global Payments faced the challenge of running high-volume payment authorizations – over 250 transactions per second – with strict compliance requirements, while also needing global availability and disaster recovery capabilities. Their existing monolithic systems struggled with scalability, resilience, and regulatory overhead.
By adopting CockroachDB as the core of their multi-region architecture, Global Payments was able to meet stringent subsecond latency demands, ensure 100% uptime even during intensive chaos testing, and handle a 380% increase in system capacity without compromising performance. For an enterprise processing tens of billions of card transactions worldwide, this shift established a new standard for reliability and scale.
Jess Tays, Executive Director of Data Management for Global Payments, presents in Bengaluru at RoachFest25.
Groww: Zero-Downtime Migration Mastery
Kamal Govindraj, Chief Architect at Groww, detailed how India's largest retail stockbroker moved from a monolithic MySQL database to CockroachDB. Serving over 50 million customers, Groww needed backend infrastructure as smooth and responsive as their user experience. Zero-downtime migrations and elastic scaling delivered exactly that.
In his talk, Govindraj emphasized that multi-region support wasn't just a nice-to-have: It was essential. The platform required granular control over data residency, with the ability to pin specific data to particular regions. This high precision was crucial for meeting both performance benchmarks and strict compliance requirements at scale.
Cost played an equally important role. While Govindraj's team was ready to invest in a premium database that could deliver on resilience and regulatory demands, they needed predictable pricing. The winning platform had to thread the needle: CockroachDB gives Groww enterprise-grade features without budget surprises that could derail their expansion plans.
Kamal Govindraj, Chief Architect at Groww, explained how their data architecture moved from monolith to CockroachDB.
AWS Fireside Chat: Financial Services Evolution
Cockroach Labs and AWS have long enjoyed a productive partnership: CockroachDB offers robust integrations with AWS, for a powerful infrastructure that leverages the scalability and resilience of both platforms.
Kiran Jagannath, Head of Financial Services & Conglomerates, AWS India, joined Allen Terleto, VP of Global Partners and Ecosystem, Cockroach Labs, onstage for an engaging discussion about cloud transformation in financial services. They explored the market forces, from regulatory pressure to AI adoption, that are accelerating distributed database adoption across India and globally.
(l-r) Allen Terleto, VP of Global Partners and Ecosystem, Cockroach Labs, and Kiran Jagannath, Head of Financial Services & Conglomerates, AWS India, talked cloud transformation for Finserv.
Ecosystem Panel: Beyond Individual Tools
The Outcomes Track wrapped with an insightful panel featuring leaders from identity and access management (IAM) leader Ory, infrastructure identity innovators Teleport, and Cockroach Labs.
Jonathan Clark, Sales Director, EMEA & APAC of Ory, Muneer Taskar, Sales Director, EMEA & APAC of Teleport, and Tejas Baldev, Senior Sales Director - APAC of Cockroach Labs explored how integrated ecosystems, not isolated tools, power next-generation enterprise applications. Their conversation highlighted how resilience, security, and scale converge in cloud-native architectures.
One notable example of these principles in action: pioneering AI provider OpenAI partnered with Ory, an open source identity provider, to deliver a highly resilient IAM system backed by CockroachDB.
(l-r) Jonathan Clark, Sales Director, EMEA & APAC of Ory, Muneer Taskar, Sales Director, EMEA & APAC put IAM in the spotlight.
CockroachDB’s Path Forward
In his keynote, Spencer Kimball emphasized that outages are not OK – they cost businesses anywhere from $10K to over $1M each and, in cases like the CrowdStrike incident, billions. Scheduled downtime isn’t an option; resilience must be the baseline.
He introduced CockroachDB’s approach to Performance under Adversity benchmark, which measures not just raw throughput and latency but resilience and recovery during real-world stresses including disk stalls, network partitions, node restarts, and even full regional outages. Each release raises the bar, with recent improvements delivering 50% more performance alongside stronger fault tolerance.
Spencer also previewed CockroachDB 25.3 enhancements and roadmap updates, including:
Enhanced migration tooling (including Oracle support)
A new Kubernetes operator for easier cloud-native management
LDAP/AD integration to streamline compliance
The takeaway: CockroachDB isn’t just built for scale, it’s setting the standard for resilience when it matters most.
Presentations at RoachFest25 offered the audience thought-provoking perspectives on data.
The RoachFest Effect: New Friends & Connections
Each and every RoachRest is special because it’s ultimately about the people, not just the tech.
RoachFest Bengaluru was no different: The expo zone buzzed, while the networking lunch and closing reception fostered connections across industries and regions. Local startups mingled with global fintechs and enterprise architects, sharing stories, exchanging strategies, and forming new friendships.
It was a memorable day that reinforced a fundamental truth: real systems don't operate in perfect conditions, and enterprise applications show what they’re really made of under pressure. With CockroachDB, businesses in India, and around the world, are always ready to deliver.
Building community and connections at RoachFest25.
Want to feel the magic of RoachFest25 live and in person? Get your complimentary pass now with code RF100! Register now to attend in Las Vegas, October 14, 2025.
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Rob Reid is Cockroach Labs’ Technical Evangelist and a software developer from London, England. In his career, he has written backend, frontend, and messaging software for the police, travel, finance, commodities, sports betting, telecoms, retail, and aerospace industries. He is the author of "Practical CockroachDB: Building Fault-Tolerant Distributed SQL Databases" (Apress) and "Understanding Multi-Region Application Architecture" (O’Reilly) and has two CockroachDB tattoos.
