In 2018, financial services company Finleap Connect GmbH was looking to take move its operations to the cloud. The company found Cockroach Labs Inc. to help.

At the time, CockroachDB was a fledgling player in the distributed SQL market. But Finleap’s decision to work with Cockroach turned as intended, with effective results.

“We were running on MySQL setup with a virtual machine back then,” said Christian Hüning (pictured, right), director of cloud technologies at Finleap. “And then we were looking for something that we could just deploy in Kubernetes, alongside with everything else. We had to stack and duplicate it many times. Cockroach delivered that proposition. That was why we evaluated the risk of early adopting and took the leap of faith.”

Hüning and Jim Walker (pictured), principal product evangelist at Cockroach Labs, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Paul Gillin and guest analyst Keith Townsend in a conversation at last year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed CockroachDB’s consistent improvement, specifically in incorporating K8s integrations and managing SQL’s complexities. (* Disclosure below.)

CockroachDB’s uniquely scalable approach

Finleap had a myriad of considerations it needed to address with its cloud-native move. First, it needed to meet stringent operational requirements from regulators. Second, the company needed to devise a hybrid solution to accommodate on-prem deployment demands. Third, the company needed a scalable Kubernetes-run solution within a VM environment, according to Hüning.

The key to CockroachDB being able to meet the company’s unique needs is due in large part to its approach to the automation of scale, according to Walker.

“We started from the very beginning to be something different,” he said. “This is a cloud-native database built with the same exact principles that are in Kubernetes. This was started by three engineers that worked at Google. They thought, ‘How do we give that kind of Google-like infrastructure to everybody?’ And that’s the advent of Cockroach and why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe event. Red Hat Inc., the main sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, Cockroach Labs Inc., or other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE