A CockroachDB cluster consists of a number of nodes that can be spread across failure domains such as data centres or public cloud regions.

It can provide high levels of resilience and availability and can be run in a variety of environments such as bare metal, VMs, containers and Kubernetes, both in private data centers and in the cloud.

[8] Spencer Kimball wrote the first iteration of the design in January 2014, and began the open-source project on GitHub in February 2014, allowing outside access and contributions.

[9] Development on GitHub attracted substantial contributions, which earned the project the Open Source Rookie of the Year award by Black Duck Software.

[15][16][13] CockroachDB has a consistency model that is designed to match as closely as possible to the capabilities of Google Spanner, but without a dependence on specialized hardware for time synchronization.