Crate Technology has designed a database system for supporting Docker containers and microservices. The technology stresses ease of use, speed and scalability while retaining the ability to use SQL against very large data sets.
Crate was built to run in ephemeral environments, said Christian Lutz, Crate CEO. It was the ninth official Docker image in the Docker Registry and has been downloaded more than 350,000 times in the past six months. It can be managed with Docker tools, or with Kubernetes or Mesos.
“We believe that microservices architecture will definitely win,” Lutz said. “What you do with application containers already in production will very quickly create a requirement for databases [in containers] as well. If you don’t have the architecture for that, you can’t run in a scalable way in containers. You can take a database that doesn’t work in a container — obviously, SQL works in a container — but you have one node and one volume, but you can’t add hundreds of nodes. That’s why I think it will be very important when people start to put the database into containers.”
