Evaluation of CockroachDB in a cloud-native environment

Abstract: The increased demand for using large databases that scale easily and stay consistent requires service providers to find new solutions for storing data in databases. One solution that has emerged is cloud-native databases. Service providers who effectively can transit to cloud-native databases will benefit from new enterprise applications, industrial automation, Internet of Things (IoT) as well as consumer services, such as gaming and AR/VR. This consequently changes the requirements on a database's architecture and infrastructure in terms of being compatible with the services deployed in a cloud-native environment - this is where CockroachDB comes into the picture. CockroachDB is relatively new and is built from the ground up to run in a cloud-native environment. It is built up with nodes that work as individual machines, and these nodes form a cluster. The authors of this report aim to evaluate the characteristics of the Cockroach database to get an understanding of what it offers to companies that are in a cloud-infrastructure transition phase. For the scope of characteristics, this report is focusing on performance, throughput, stress-test, version hot-swapping, horizontal-/vertical scaling, and node disruptions. To do this, a CockroachDB database was deployed on a Kubernetes cluster, in which simulated traffic was conducted. For the throughput measurement, the TPC-C transaction processing benchmark was used. For scaling, version hot-swapping, and node disruptions, an experimental method was performed. The result of the study confirms the expected outcome. CockroachDB does in fact scale easily, both horizontally and vertically, with minimal effort. It also shows that the throughput remains the same when the cluster is scaled up and out since CockroachDB does not have a master write-node, which is the case with some other databases. CockroachDB also has built-in functionality to handle configuration changes like version hot-swapping and node disruptions. This study concluded that CockroachDB lives up to its promises regarding the subjects handled in the report, and can be seen as a robust, easily scalable database that can be deployed in acloud-native environment.