Looking at the Current State of Resilience with Spencer Kimball

Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, joins Corey Quinn to discuss the evolving challenges of database resilience in 2025. They discuss the State of Resilience 2025 report, revealing widespread operational concerns, costly outages, and gaps in failover preparedness. Modern resilience strategies, like active-active configurations and consensus replication, reduce risks but require expertise and investment. Spencer highlights growing regulatory pressures, such as the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, and the rising complexity of distributed systems. Despite challenges, Cockroach Labs aims to simplify resilience, enabling organizations to modernize while balancing risk, cost, and customer trust. Show Highlights (0:00) Intro (0:36) Cockroach Labs sponsor read (3:14) The foundational nature of databases (3:55) Cockroach Labs’ State of Resilience 2025 report (8:55) CrowdStrike as an example of why database resilience is so important (11:04) What Spencer found most surprising in the report’s results (15:13) Understanding the multi-cloud strategy as safety in numbers (18:29) Cockroach Labs sponsor read (19:23) Why cost isn’t the Achilles’ heel of the multi-cloud strategy that some people think (23:52) Executives are blaming IT people for outages as much (28:21) The importance of active-active configurations (32:01) Why anxiety about operational resiliency will never fully go away (37:52) How to access the State of Resilience 2025 report About Spencer Kimball Spencer Kimball is the CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs, a company dedicated to building resilient, cloud-native databases. Before founding Cockroach Labs, Spencer had a distinguished career in technology, including contributions to Google’s Colossus file system. Alongside co-founders Peter Mattis and Ben Darnell, he launched CockroachDB, a globally distributed SQL database designed to handle modern data challenges like resilience, multi-cloud deployment, and compliance with evolving data sovereignty laws. CockroachDB is renowned for its innovative architecture, enabling consistent and scalable database performance across regions and clouds. Under Spencer’s leadership, the company continues to redefine operational resilience for enterprises worldwide. LinksCockroach Labs: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/The State of Resilience 2025 report https://www.cockroachlabs.com/guides/the-state-of-resilience-2025/ Sponsor Cockroach Labs: cockroachlabs.com/lastweek