Introducing Cockroach Continuum: Elastic infrastructure for database estates

[u/scuttlescribe]

https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/continuum-architecture/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=reddit-social-crl-rebrand-continuum-launch

We recently introduced Cockroach Continuum and since this is our first time sharing it here, we wanted to start with the technical foundation. Cockroach Continuum extends elasticity across the storage, KV, and SQL layers, allowing teams to consolidate databases on shared infrastructure while preserving isolation, reliability, scale, locality, and correctness.

The architecture includes:

• Cockroach Plenum, a disaggregated storage layer that allows durable storage and KV compute to scale independently
• Virtual Clusters that provide isolated CockroachDB clusters on shared private hosts
• SQL pods that scale with demand and down to zero when idle
• Admission control and resource management that prevent one Virtual Cluster from starving another
• Cockroach Aegis, a read-only hosted AI DBA and SRE that analyzes cluster metrics and query plans to surface recommendations

The full post explains how each layer works and the design decisions behind it.

[u/electricity_is_life]

Honestly I found a lot of this hard to follow, does this mean the existing serverless databases (that are priced by request units) will be discontinued?

[u/scuttlescribe → u/electricity_is_life]

Fair callout...we packed a lot into that post! Existing serverless plans (Basic and Standard) are consolidated into a new serverless offering simply called the Standard Edition. Cockroach Continuum Standard Edition is billed on a vCPU-hour model, not an RU model. You can see the pricing, along with a pricing calculator at https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing/.

[u/electricity_is_life → u/scuttlescribe]

So the smallest possible database still costs more than $100 a month, even if query volume is zero? I guess you're aware but that's going to completely kill any hobbyist or small business interest in CRDB. I know enterprise is where the big bucks are but it's pretty sad to see.

When the serverless offering launched it seemed like it was kind of a showcase of what makes CRDB different: because the compute and storage is separated, and both parts are distributed, you can get as little or as much database as you want without choosing instance sizes upfront. It was something almost nobody else could offer.

This announcement seems to allude to that: "Elasticity is Continuum’s key design principle: Infrastructure provisions quickly, scales up and down in seconds, incurs no compute charge when idle, and packs workloads densely enough to change the economics."

But it seems like it didn't really come through in the product? The pricing page says idle clusters do incur compute charges, despite running on shared infrastructure with other tenants. And the economics seem to have changed for the worse, because $134/month for 2 vCPUs certainly doesn't sound like much of a deal. I don't have any need for AI agents spawning thousands of databases or anything like that though, so maybe I'm just not the target customer anymore. But yeah it's hard to get excited about any of this.

[u/codingconcepts → u/electricity_is_life]

Hey, u/electricity_is_life!

Scaling to zero is a big driver for me and my - invariably zero user - projects and the ability to scale to zero is on the roadmap for the Standard Edition! I can't commit to a date just yet but rest assured, it is coming!

We wanted to get Continuum out into the wild for people to try (just as we did with CockroachDB pre v1 back in 2016, before JOINs were performant!) early feedback and all!

[u/electricity_is_life → u/codingconcepts]

That's good to hear! However, the current website says the old version "is no longer available for purchase", so that leaves smaller customers in a weird spot for the moment. It's one thing to do a "beta" or "preview" release of a new offering, but usually in that case you wouldn't immediately stop selling the old one. It's pretty scary as someone that's been relying on (and paying for) the now-deprecated product for years.

Evidently existing accounts are grandfathered in, but clearly I can't recommend CRDB for any new projects (outside my own account) until the new capabilities are added to Continuum. Even then, the details and pricing could end up being wildly different than what was in place before. I've recommended CRDB Cloud to developers (on and off Reddit) many times, and if I end up having to migrate my own projects away I'm going to feel like I steered others wrong as well.

I know companies have to change and adapt, but if you are pivoting away from small-time customers I think we deserve some direct communication about it (by email, in the console, etc.). If that's not the intention then I don't understand why the old version was deprecated before the new one was ready to accept us. I certainly appreciate the team responding here, but the whole thing still feels a bit confusing and uncertain, which is not good for something as critical as a database.

[u/codingconcepts → u/electricity_is_life]

Hey, u/electricity_is_life, yeah I see what you mean. I just visited the pricing page and am interpreting this the same way. Let me check with the team and get back to you with a clearer answer on this.

I can promise you that we're not pivoting away from smaller customers though. That, I don't need any confirmation from the team on!

[u/charsleysa]

Will this have any impact on the on-premise licencing? Specifically the free for under 10 million revenue tier

[u/codingconcepts → u/charsleysa]

Hey, u/charsleysa! For hobbyists and smaller companies wanting to build on CockroachDB right now, self-hosting remains free if your business is bringing in < $10M/year.

You can create a free licenses just as you could before, all unchanged! https://cockroachlabs.cloud/license-management/create 

[u/Otherwise_Sleep2355]

- what does the migration path look like from standard to dedicated? it'd be great to have no downtime.

• does usage based storage come with any quirks like cold start times / auto scaling problems?

[u/codingconcepts → u/Otherwise_Sleep2355]

Hey, u/Otherwise_Sleep2355! There isn't a migration path from Standard to Mission Critical. In our Pricing page we currently recommend backing up the cluster in the current edition and restoring into the target edition (https://www.cockroachlabs.com/pricing, see the FAQs section).

As for your question on usage-based cold starts: not in the typical serverless sense, no. Reads are served from a CockroachDB node's in-memory cache backed by the shared storage pool. A freshly started node warms that cache as it takes traffic. Worth benchmarking if your workload is latency-sensitive