Never used cockroach so pardon my ignorance, but are there no operational challenges with running/using them? Or are they the same challenges? And how compatible is it from an application developer perspective?
The managed service is hassle free and it's auto sharded so you don't have traditional scaling issues. You do need to think about how your index choices spread writes and reads on the cluster to avoid hotspots. It's almost completely compatible with postgres wire protocol but it doesn't support things like extensions for the most part.
There are TONS of operational issues running cockroach. At the last company I was at cockroach was probably over used as a magical way to run multiple DCs and keep things consistent without high developer overhead, but it was #1 source of large outages. So much so that we’d run a cockroach segmented out for a single microservice to limit the blast radius when it eventually failed.
That and its comically more expensive than Postgres, if you think IOPs are expensive wait till you see the service contract.
In ye olden times I used to stop bosses from throwing away the slowest machine we had, and try to get at least one faster machine.
It’s still somewhat the case, but at the time the world was rotten with concurrent code that only worked because an implicit invariant (almost) always held. One that was enforced by the relative time or latency involved with two competing tasks. Get new motherboards or storage or memory and that invariant goes from failing only when the exact right packet loss happens, to failing every day, or hour, or minute.
Yes, it’s a bug, but it wasn’t on your radar and the system was trucking along yesterday and now everything is on fire.
The people who know this think the parent is a very interesting question. The people who don’t, tend to think it’s a non sequitur.
Except for the un-implemented features which they might need.
It also uses serializable isolation and in their implementation reads are blocked by writes unlike in Postgres. Those are both significant changes that can have far reaching application impacts
