Case Study: Storj Labs achieves global horizontal scale for trillions of objects with Cockroach Labs

How Storj is using CockroachDB to dramatically scale global cloud storage

Storj Labs, a distributed cloud object-storage provider that leverages spare drives worldwide, needed a database that could scale to billions or trillions of objects while providing high availability and strong transactional consistency across continents. After evaluating options, Storj Labs migrated from PostgreSQL to CockroachDB from Cockroach Labs because it is PostgreSQL wire-compatible (making the transition easy) and met their requirements for horizontal scale, global metadata performance, and managed operations; they use CockroachDB for billing, account management, and core metadata storage.

Cockroach Labs delivered a managed, multi-region CockroachDB deployment that Storj Labs runs across 9 regions on three continents, enabling rapid region provisioning and strong support engagement. The solution scaled a cluster to 5.1 billion rows (~5.5 TB), averaging ~5k read ops/sec and ~1.2k write ops/sec, while providing the availability and consistency Storj required; with Cockroach Labs’ managed service and premium support, Storj has been able to grow globally and drive customer cost and carbon reductions of over 80%.

Storj Labs

Jacob Willoughby

Chief Technology Officer