[mbyio]

Cockroach automates the sharding of data by region and provides tools that let you use and manage it more like a traditional database. If they didn't use cockroach, they would have to write/setup tools and adapters to do all that anyway. It would probably be more familiar to developers conceptually if they used traditional sharding, but why build and maintain all that when you can just use off the shelf software?

[karmakaze]

CockroachDB had "Follow the sun" multi-region data balancing, which then got generalized to "Follow the workload"[0].

[0] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/topology-follow-th...