How we built a forever-free serverless SQL database

Cockroach Labs has launched the first truly scalable Serverless SQL database, which is available for free. The Serverless architecture allows thousands of virtualized CockroachDB database clusters to be hosted on a single underlying physical CockroachDB database cluster. This enables efficient packing together of data from multiple tenants in a shared storage layer while maintaining security and isolation. The multi-tenancy support is achieved by isolating the SQL layer in per-tenant processes, along with transactional and distribution components from the KV layer, while the KV replication and storage components continue to run on shared storage nodes.