Scheduled Backups
Native backup scheduling built into CockroachDB for reliable, conflict-aware data protection.
Backups are only useful if they actually run. At CockroachDB, customers who relied on external schedulers like cron to trigger backups discovered an uncomfortable truth: those schedulers are far less resilient than the database itself. A missed cron job, a network blip, or an orchestration failure could silently leave a cluster unprotected — and because backup commands were not idempotent, naive retries could cause conflicts.
This project introduced a native scheduling system built directly into CockroachDB. Rather than bolting on an external scheduler, the feature worked with the database's own distributed architecture to ensure that scheduled backups were reliable, conflict-aware, and self-healing. If a scheduled backup failed, the system could intelligently retry without creating duplicate or partial backup artifacts.
As an early product management project at Cockroach Labs, this work shaped my approach to infrastructure features: meet the system where it lives, respect its paradigms, and build something that operators can trust without babysitting.