Engineering

If you remember from the Marvel Avengers movies, one of the most critical and universe-defining events is “the blip” or “the snap.” This article will show you how to build a simple web app using Node.js that shows all the Marvel characters and their “blip” status, giving us the ability to update each character’s blip state on the database by clicking a button. We use Express.js as our framework and Pug for page templates and seed the database with character data from the official Marvel API while referencing our list of blipped and non-blipped characters to add a flag to the data. And, of course, CockroachDB Serverless is our database. Finally, we deploy our app to Heroku.

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that allows you to automate running and orchestrating container workloads. It is a powerful tool that offers a huge ecosystem of tools — package managers, service meshes, source plugins, monitoring tools, and more — as an abstraction layer for deploying standardized, full-stack applications across an ever-increasing range of platforms. Kubernetes is often referred to as “K8s.”

Michelle Gienow

July 14, 2021

A few days ago, we (Artem and Chris) were working with two different customers that had the same requirement: they needed to encrypt certain tables in their databases. This is not uncommon. Encryption comes with a slight performance penalty, so many companies prefer not to encrypt their entire database. Instead, the best practice is to encrypt only the tables that contain sensitive information, so less-sensitive data can be accessed without the overhead the encryption creates.

As we outlined in Deploy a Multi-Region Application in Just 3 Steps, we’ve made major changes to simplify the multi-region configuration in CockroachDB. The new abstractions allow users to think of multi-region databases and tables in three ways:

As an SRE on the CockroachDB Dedicated team, we have the unique challenge of monitoring and managing a fleet of CockroachDB clusters around the globe. Perhaps needless to say, as a distributed database, security is an utmost priority for us. To address some of the needs related to security and monitoring (for example intrusion detection audit logging), we’ve invested in our next generation of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) infrastructure.

In 2019, we published an exploration of the size and makeup of the executable files produced by the Go compiler. CockroachDB engineers, the Go team, and the greater Go community were intrigued by the analysis, and the results of it pushed our projects further. Two years passed, and both Go and CockroachDB had evolved significantly in that time. We wanted to explore: What might have changed? What could we learn?

Do you enjoy weird and strange build issues? Or do you think something we do in this blog post is fishy and you want to fix it? Want us to use bazel instead? Good news - we’ve got a role for you! We’re on the lookout for more engineers on our Developer Infrastructure team! We’re looking to expand our sprawling development infrastructure as we grow to more people and a bigger codebase with new and exciting functionality and cloud management. If you want to help the engineers write the exciting next generation of databases by empowering their work environment, don’t delay - apply today!

The current mentorship model is broken. It requires you to have the privilege of belonging to an established network (like a renowned university) or ‘cold call’ potential mentors on a platform like LinkedIn. Even after you find a mentor, it’s difficult to sustain a mentor-mentee connection. This is the challenge a group of students from Lassonde School of Engineering at York University set out to resolve through their Hack the North 2020++ app: mntr.tech

Amruta Ranade

March 19, 2021

It’s been over six years since CockroachDB became a GitHub project. In that time, the project has racked up more than 20,000 GitHub stars, which is a simple way for GitHub users to bookmark repositories that interest them. Naturally, we’ve wondered how people find out about our project. Are there things we could do to accelerate awareness and interest?

Spencer Kimball

February 22, 2021