Kelsey Hightower Joins RoachFest 2025 Following Visionary Kickoff in London

Cockroach Labs' global conference series heads to Bengaluru and Las Vegas as data leaders seek resilient infrastructure at scale

NEW YORK, June 26, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Cockroach Labs, a pioneer in cloud-native distributed SQL databases, today announced the next chapters of RoachFest 2025, following a sold-out and insight-packed launch in London. The flagship conference series continues in Bengaluru on September 25 and Las Vegas on October 14, uniting technologists, architects, and business leaders to explore how to future-proof their data infrastructure in a rapidly evolving world.

As digital transformation accelerates, enterprises face mounting pressure to ensure global availability, regulatory compliance, and seamless scalability—demands that legacy databases were never built to handle. Cloud-native applications now require always-on resilience and real-time performance by default. RoachFest 2025 is designed around this new reality. Its theme, Performance Under Pressure, reflects a growing need among CIOs, CTOs, and chief architects to adopt next-generation data architectures that can deliver under adverse conditions—including AI-driven workloads, regulatory complexity, and global-scale operations.

RoachFest London, hosted in the heart of the city, set the tone for this mission, highlights include:

• Kaizen Gaming and Booking.com presented real-world cases on modernizing infrastructure to support international expansion and mission-critical services.
• Peter Mattis, Cockroach Labs Co-Founder and CTO, delivered a keynote on why distributed SQL must perform under adversity, introducing a resilience-first benchmarking framework.
• A panel featuring AWS, PwC, and Cockroach Labs explored how enterprises can navigate EU data sovereignty laws like GDPR and DORA while maintaining operational excellence.
• SumUp shared how it scaled a high-performance, low-latency payment engine with CockroachDB after facing limits with Amazon RDS.

"The conversations at RoachFest London confirmed that we're entering a new era of infrastructure thinking," said Peter Mattis, Co-Founder and CTO of Cockroach Labs. "It's no longer enough for systems to perform well in perfect conditions. Today's leaders are designing for resilience under real-world adversity—where global scale, regulatory complexity, and AI-driven workloads collide. That's the vision driving RoachFest forward."

Kelsey Hightower to Headline RoachFest Las Vegas
Industry luminary Kelsey Hightower will headline RoachFest Las Vegas, bringing his unmatched perspective on cloud-native systems and the future of distributed data.

With over 20 years of experience as a sysadmin, developer, operator, and technical leader, Hightower has built a reputation for helping people make sense of complexity and for championing the practitioners who keep systems running.

At RoachFest, he'll take the stage to reflect on what it really takes to build software that holds up—at scale, under pressure, and over time.

Global Innovation, Local Relevance
As Cockroach Labs celebrates ten years of database innovation, RoachFest brings together customers and partners who are reshaping their industries with cloud-native architecture—each facing high-stakes challenges of scale, resilience, and compliance in radically different environments. Attendees will gain practical insights and hands-on expertise across the full spectrum of modern database architecture—from deep-dive sessions with partners to previews of upcoming CockroachDB capabilities including observability upgrades, performance enhancements, and vector support for AI workloads.

In Bengaluru, we'll spotlight how leading innovators are reshaping India's digital economy with resilient, cloud-native infrastructure. Yubi, the country's largest debt marketplace, is leveraging CockroachDB to power 10x transactional growth across its YubiOS platform, all while staying cloud-neutral, compliant, and ready for the future. Global Payments, a multinational fintech with a strong presence in India, will share how it modernized a mission-critical legacy system using CockroachDB—achieving subsecond latencies, multi-region resilience, and regulatory alignment in one of the world's fastest-growing payments markets. Hands-on CockroachDB University workshops will give teams the tools to build for global consistency, regulatory compliance, and multi-region reliability—key capabilities as enterprise systems evolve to withstand real-world failures, support AI-native workloads, and perform under pressure.

In Las Vegas, the focus turns to North American innovators pushing the boundaries of performance at scale. FanDuel, the #1 sportsbook in the U.S., will share how CockroachDB powers their real-time financial ledger to meet the demands of millions of users placing bets in milliseconds, all while maintaining regulatory integrity and uptime. Squarespace, known for its design-forward approach to building websites, recently migrated several services from PostgreSQL to CockroachDB to improve global availability and eliminate the operational tax of scaling legacy databases.

Registration is now open for RoachFest Bengaluru and Las Vegas. Visit cockroachlabs.com/roachfest to explore speaker lineups, session details, and insights from the London kickoff.

About Cockroach Labs
Cockroach Labs is a pioneering software company at the forefront of database technology, dedicated to delivering resilient and scalable database solutions to run mission-critical workloads for the world's most important businesses. The company's clients include Bose, Form3, Hard Rock Digital, and Shipt, Fortune 50 global financial institutions as well as retail and media industry leaders. With a mission to scale when others fail, Cockroach Labs is revolutionizing the way businesses manage their data with its innovative cloud native distributed SQL database, CockroachDB.

SOURCE Cockroach Labs, Inc.