RoachFest Recap: City Storage Systems’ Multi-Regional Microservices

City Storage Systems (CSS), a startup known for its brands Otter, CloudKitchens, and Lab37, was highlighted at the final installment of RoachFest 2024 in New York City. CSS aims to revolutionize restaurant infrastructure by building software to support growing food businesses and kitchens. Their goal is to deliver a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) for developers without worrying about platform reliability. At the event, Software Engineer at CSS, Frederik Stenum Mogensen, presented on "Low Latency Multi-Regional Microservices: Coordinating Data Locality." He discussed how his team developed an innovative pattern to ensure low latency in a multi-regional microservices environment using CockroachDB zone configurations and a Kubernetes operator. CSS's approach involves using Kubernetes operators for resource provisioning and data placement across tables, custom developer-defined resources for specifying desired states for data sharding and placement, defined business domains, mapped partitions to specific regions, and smart load balancing to route requests efficiently within regions. This solution maintains low latency and reliability in a multi-regional microservices setting by leveraging CockroachDB and Kubernetes while minimizing cross-region network data transfer, reducing costs, and improving performance.