RoachFest Recap: Why Starburst Deploys CockroachDB in Six Regions

The text discusses RoachFest, a global event series for data professionals focused on operational resilience and performance at scale. Matt Stephenson, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Starburst, was a guest speaker at the final gathering in New York City. Starburst is the developer of the fastest and most scalable open hybrid data lakehouse. The company built Starburst Galaxy, a cloud-managed service for their distributed data lakehouse platform using Trino (formerly Presto), an open-source SQL query engine. Starburst chose CockroachDB to power its multi-region cloud lakehouse platform due to its high survivability and performance goals. The company has found that CockroachDB is always available even when entire regions fail, supports multi-region and multi-cloud deployments, and enables seamless service interruption management. Today, Starburst operates across 25 cloud regions on AWS, GCP, and Azure, with six regions using CockroachDB to guarantee roundtrip times of 40-80ms for queries coming from their services plane.