Its looking a lot like an account used for promotion. As a reminder for OP:
Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
So while the reason Cockroach Labs employees are paid to write these articles might ultimately be marketing, they're far from being what I'd consider marketing fluff pieces, and so it feels to me that they're at least as much "for curiosity" as they are "for promotion".
Again, I'm in no special position to interpret the rules, but I find it hard to object to the content itself, and I figure most articles like this are going to get posted here eventually anyway. Would proper Hacker News etiquette be to wait for someone not affiliated with Cockroach Labs to post it?
I like seeing stuff like this and I don't view it as promotion (or if it is, it's 10% promotion and 90% technical content).
The model ended up working fantastically well, and I can't say enough about how much I like ScyllaDB so far. I will say I wish there was an easier backup method, but I understand that's a big ask on a distributed DB and automating our backups wasn't that difficult.