Yugabyte, the company behind the distributed SQL database, announced the release of Yugabyte DB 2.0 today. This release marks the evolution of their database to meet the needs of modern enterprises who are investing heavily in being cloud native and rely on open source technologies to speed up the innovation. As organizations transition to a more agile enterprise, they focus not only on modernizing their infrastructure but they also want to modernize their applications. To build modern applications, reliance on monolithic legacy databases like Oracle makes very little sense. Organizations are increasingly relying on distributed databases for their applications. Examples of modern distributed applications include Yugabyte, Amazon Aurora, CockroachDB, CosmosDB, etc..
Yugabyte DB 2.0
Yugabyte DB 2.0 comes with features critical for enterprises as they build modern applications that are increasingly distributed (including Microservices architecture) and are highly scalable. Some features include:
- Support for PostgreSQL syntax and Wire protocol compatibility. By adding support for PostgreSQL syntax, applications can be easily ported to cloud native environments instead of re-architecting to support NoSQL. Wire protocol compatibility makes it easy to run distributed applications
- YSQL underwent Jepsen testing which validated the new serializable isolation level and showed the robustness of Yugabyte DB under plausible failure conditions such as network partitions, clock skew, and process restarts. This is critical for enterprise as they embrace distributed database for their applications
- New Oracle to Yugabyte migration utilities
- Integration with GraphQL, Hasura, Prisma, Rook.io and a variety of database administration tools to make Yugabyte DB compatible with existing enterprise tools
- 100% open source with the entire source code available under Apache 2.0 license
Yugabyte also claims that Yugabyte DB 2.0 is almost 2X better performance than AWS Aurora and 5X than CockroachDB.
StackSense Take
Multi cloud is becoming a norm in the enterprise driven mainly by developer demand for cloud services. In our framework for Modern Enterprise Innovation, we have highlighted portability as one of the pillars. Even though many consider portability to avoid lock-in issues, we also recommend it from a flexibility point of view. This flexibility is critical to keep innovating with changing technology landscape. We recommend using Portable APIs to avoid lock-in and keep the flexibility. We see Yugabyte 2.0 not only as a powerful distributed database well suited for modern applications but also as a Portable API that can help organizations avoid lock-in and keep the flexibility needed to evolve fast. The flexibility to evolve is one of the core components of agility which is often overlooked. One of the main criticism for using such abstractions instead of native cloud services is about the operational overhead. But Yugabyte is architected in such a way to keep this overhead small with no measurable impact. Yugabyte DB provides a self-service experience for developers just like any cloud service. On the operational side, they can create and manage multi-region deployments with few clicks along with capabilities like backups to S3, monitoring and alerts which are already built-in. I would also expect them to offer a hosted offering in the future to compete more effectively with cloud services.
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