Noman Hamlani

So you were worried about a failure, and it happened. Despite all of the planning, something went wrong, and now the goal is to minimize the impact of that failure. As part of our blog series, “Surviving Failures with CockroachDB,” this blog will cover what your options are when things inevitably fail. When the built-in high-availability options aren’t enough, use our disaster recovery tools to minimize your RPO and RTO, and ensure that your customers are back online as soon as possible.

Outages are the new normal in 2025, and modern enterprises need to be able to react as efficiently as possible to mitigate the blast radius. To that end, we’ve launched a 3-part blog series called “Surviving Failures with CockroachDB.” In our first post, we covered 11 of the most common application- and database-layer failures, and how CockroachDB supports our customers in the event of the inevitable.

In today’s always-on digital world, even the most advanced systems are vulnerable to unexpected failures. Whether it’s an unhandled exception, a network outage, or a critical database failure, these disruptions don’t just slow you down—they can cost your business time, money, and customer trust. But what if your database didn’t just react to failure, but actively worked to prevent it? CockroachDB is designed with resilience as a core principle.