Deployment

CockroachDB deployments come in three shapes: dedicated single-tenant clusters, multi-tenant host+SQL-pod deployments, and CockroachDB Serverless. The repo includes binaries and configurations for all three.

Producing release artifacts

pkg/cmd/release/ and pkg/cmd/publish-artifacts/ drive the release process:

1. Cut a tag (e.g. v25.4.5).
2. CI builds for darwin-amd64, darwin-arm64, linux-amd64, linux-arm64, windows-amd64, and FIPS variants.
3. Artifacts are published to S3 and Docker Hub.
4. The cockroach binary embeds version and build info from pkg/build/.

Packaging

The repo emits:

• A standalone cockroach binary.
• A cockroach-sql binary.
• Container images via build/Dockerfile and the release tooling.
• Kubernetes manifests under cloud/kubernetes/ (some upstream and some demonstration).
• Datadog dashboard JSON in pkg/cli/cockroachdb_datadog_dashboard.json.

CI for cluster lifecycle

CI runs:

• Unit tests — every package on every PR.
• Logictest — across multiple cluster configs (local, 5-node, multiregion, mixed-version).
• Acceptance — small docker-compose-driven smoke tests.
• Roachtest — long-running real-cluster tests on AWS and GCE.
• Mixed-version logictest — recent prior versions joined to the current binary.
• Microbench — across recent commits, alerting on regressions.

The release-cut workflow is in .github/workflows/release-cut.yml.

Auto-upgrade

pkg/server/auto_upgrade.go runs an in-cluster job that finalizes the cluster version once every node reports it can support the next version. Operators can opt out by setting cluster.preserve_downgrade_option.

Decommission and drain

• Drain (pkg/server/drain.go) — graceful shutdown with lease transfer.
• Decommission (pkg/server/decommission.go) — permanent removal; replicas move off, range leases drain.

Multi-tenant orchestration

For SQL pods, the host cluster boots a system-tenant Server. SQL pods run as separate processes started with cockroach mt start-sql. The host's controller (pkg/server/server_controller*.go) orchestrates which tenant runs where.

CockroachDB Serverless additionally uses pkg/ccl/sqlproxyccl/ (a TCP proxy) to terminate pgwire and dispatch by tenant.

Related pages

• systems/server — node lifecycle.
• systems/cluster-version-and-upgrade — rolling-upgrade story.
• features/multi-tenant — orchestration.