Presenting YugabyteDB 2.17 and YugabyteDB Managed Innovations: Ready for Any App

Building the best distributed SQL database on the planet remains Yugabyte’s top priority! To support that mission, this morning we announced another major wave of product innovations, starting with the availability of YugabyteDB 2.17 and major enhancements to YugabyteDB Managed.

This new release extends the reach of YugabyteDB. Now you can power more business-critical enterprise applications with the industry’s best cloud native database.

The latest enhancements provide continuous protection for critical data, lower the total cost of ownership with our enhanced global DBaaS offering, and accelerate overall productivity with new usability enhancements.

Embrace the Future with Distributed SQL

To grow your business, you need fast, reliable access to accurate data. This critical component allows you to meet high customer expectations and accelerate the productivity of your developers and IT operators. 

YugabyteDB 2.17 makes this easy by providing you with a future-proof database that can power a wide range of business-critical applications. YugabyteDB 2.17 and enhanced YugabyteDB Manage allow you to:

• Confidently protect your business-critical data through enhanced xCluster replication, 5x faster backup and restores, and new incremental backups.
• Expedite cloud initiatives while lowering TCO with simplified operations and advanced automation provided by major updates to YugabyteDB Managed.
• Accelerate productivity with enhanced usability through expanded ecosystem partnerships, enhanced observability and industry-leading PostgreSQL compatibility.

Below, we detail some of the ways YugabyteDB 2.17 and YugabyteDB Managed can help you and your business succeed. Don’t forget to visit the Yugabyte Distributed SQL Blog over the next few days to discover more technical details on these new releases.

Protect your Critical Data with Confidence

Organizations wanting to modernize their new and existing core transactional applications need to move away from costly monolithic databases. But, barriers to enterprise-readiness such as data protection and business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) can block the way. 

YugabyteDB 2.17 removes key obstacles to database modernization. It empowers organizations by providing a host of new benefits unmatched in both legacy and many modern databases, placing developer productivity at the core.

YugabyteDB 2.17 introduces the following key innovations:

• Increase protection with BCDR through enhanced xCluster replication. Mission-critical data has no tolerance for downtime, and organizations have very little tolerance for even non-critical data delays. In this climate, BCDR has a higher profile than ever before. Almost a fifth of outages are classified as severe or serious, meaning they result in considerable financial, reputational, and other consequences. An important objective of YugabyteDB xCluster, a differentiated asynchronous replication solution, is to ensure the integrity of the data replicated to the standby cluster. When a failover occurs and the standby cluster becomes active, applications must be able to access a consistent set of data at the standby cluster. YugabyteDB 2.17 ensures data consistency on each cluster and the order in which data changes are applied to the standby cluster. These are two crucial data integrity considerations to maintain data integrity during an active cluster failover. 
• Accelerate backup and restore with up to 5x higher throughput. With a large, ever-increasing global footprint of data, DBAs need to mitigate the challenge of accommodating growing backups during a set timeframe. We are continuously working on improving the backup and restore throughput and decreasing the restore times of YugabyteDB. Backups can be an everyday part of DBA life, but restores tend to happen on call at midnight! YugabyteDB 2.17 introduces a new backup architecture where each node sends its data directly to the backup target in parallel, eliminating bottlenecks and allowing backup to scale with deployment size. Restore is handled similarly; the initiating node coordinates with other participating nodes in parallel to read from the dump file and restore the nodes. This new scalable architecture allows each node to deliver up to a 5x improvement in backup and restore times compared to previous versions. The new capabilities can be deployed and used without configuration changes.
• Protect critical data 20x more frequently with incremental backups. Incremental backups provide differential capability that can greatly lower the RPO between backups, reduce networking costs, and reduce storage costs. YugabyteDB 2.17 powers more efficient backup and disaster recovery solutions by only transferring the data delta (what’s new or changed) since the last backup, instead of creating a full backup each time. The database looks at the changes between two snapshots and only copies the changed data across regions, reducing time and cost for backup and disaster recovery. As a result, you can create backups more frequently, potentially reducing your RPO from 1 day to 1 hour, depending on your workload.
• Simplify Point-in-time Recovery (PITR) with YugabyteDB Anywhere integration: With PITR, you establish how long to retain data and then restore the database to any arbitrary point in time (up to a microsecond) within the retention target. This allows you to recover from operational or software errors, like accidental table deletions, easily and quickly. Now with YugabyteDB 2.17, YugabyteDB Anywhere now supports the easy configuration and management of PITR through the familiar user interface.

Expedite Cloud Initiatives while Lowering TCO

Every company is considering how to streamline operations and reduce overall costs. Updates to YugabyteDB Managed can reduce your total cost of ownership while expediting your journey to a flexible, fully-managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS). 

YugabyteDB Managed was first released over a year ago, and now has numerous industry-leading customers in production. Our most recent updates can simplify your workload and help you deliver the following results:

• Meet dynamic compliance requirements with self-service geo-partitioning. Geo-partitioning in YugabyteDB Managed helps customers achieve high performance and regulatory compliance for their global applications. Companies can easily meet regulatory compliance (like GDPR) for global applications by ensuring data remains in the country. Moving data closer to the users also helps them achieve lower latency, reduced costs, and higher performance.
  
• Improve customer experience with low-latency reads from read replica.You can now seamlessly create read replicas in YugabyteDB Managed, enabling you to scale your read capacity across the globe. By seamlessly distributing the data, your customers and end users will enjoy faster data access and a more responsive application. This is crucial where you want to provide low-latency reads for read heavy transactional applications across different regions. In addition, you can scale read capacity independently in certain regions without sacrificing write latency.
• Seamlessly deliver cloud native Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) via enhanced Terraform provider. The new Terraform provider for YugabyteDB Managed is available on the Terraform registry and automates deployment of YugabyteDB Managed clusters. The enhanced Terraform provider enables you to easily evolve your database infrastructure whether it’s Day 1 provisioning or Day 2+ operations, helping you quickly create new clusters, perform efficient cluster deployments, scale your cluster up (or down), and backup or restore data as needed.
• Test a full-featured production cluster for free with new free trials of YugabyteDB Managed: You can now enjoy a free, time-limited and full-featured trial of YugabyteDB Managed dedicated tier, with no credit card required. An approved free trial gives you access to premium features for both product evaluation and production-ready use cases including fully dedicated multi-node clusters.
  
• Achieve breakout growth with Quantum Leap Program for startups. The new YugabyteDB Managed Quantum Leap Program can supercharge your business by getting you started with the best distributed SQL DBaaS for your cloud native applications. The program offers a $10,000 credit to put a  YugabyteDB Managed database in production on the cloud provider of your choice—AWS or Google Cloud. This program is open to companies building cloud native applications that are evaluating modern cloud databases for their production environment.

Accelerate Developer and Operator Productivity

We understand that many people operate on a team that has too few resources and/or not enough time. Whether you are a developer or operator, our major focus is on improving overall productivity.

YugabyteDB 2.17 allows you to improve your overall productivity by:

• Streamlining security with expanded KMS choices that include Google and Azure. When it comes to security, you want to use tools and processes you know, and that are already corporate-approved. YugabyteDB 2.17 saves time by delivering a wider choice of key management systems (KMS), which now includes support for both Google Cloud KMS and Azure Key Vault services. These options, combined with already supported HashiCorp Vault and AWS KMS, provides the most popular KMS options for centralized key management.
• Simplifying management and planning with enhanced observability. YugabyteDB 2.17 delivers an increased focus on observability to help reduce the time needed to monitor, manage, and troubleshoot your database environment. YugabyteDB 2.17 delivers a set of new metrics to YugabyteDB Anywhere, including the Top-K / Bottom-K metrics that identify outlier resources — both within a node and across the cluster. Additional metrics available include those for rejected connections due to max_connections limits reached, number of new connections initiated, and new functions to track terminated queries due to abnormal reasons.
  
• Automating maintenance tasks with scheduled Full Compactions (beta). Optimizing read performance is key to delivering responsive applications and delivering optimal experiences to your customers. Today in YugabyteDB, automatic compactions are run regularly, but large SST files are excluded unless a full compaction is run manually or through an external script. Automation of these processes is usually avoided as they are CPU and disk-intensive. However, in write or delete-heavy workloads (like those with TTL), leaving large files uncompacted can impact performance. Available as a beta in YugabyteDB 2.17, the issue can now be automated as you can schedule full compactions at regular intervals. Choose how frequently tables should be fully compacted in terms of days (the default is every 30 days). Full tablet compactions will be resilient to TServer crashes, remote bootstraps, splits, and more.
• Simplify load balancing with new Node.js Smart Driver for YSQL. Key to maintaining optimal performance in a distributed database is managing the connections and load across nodes. For strong performance and fault tolerance in YugabyteDB, you can simplify balancing application traffic (ie, connections to the database) across the nodes in the cluster through cluster-aware smart drivers. These help avoid excessive load (CPU and memory) on any single node, eliminating hot nodes. In YugabyteDB 2.17, we have released an enhanced YugabyteDB node-postgres smart driver, a distributed Node.js driver for YSQL built on the PostgreSQL node-postgres driver, with additional connection load balancing features.

Get started and learn more

We’re thrilled to deliver new enterprise-grade features in the newest version of our flagship product, YugabyteDB 2.17, as well as continue to lower the total cost of ownership for our fully-managed offering, YugabyteDB Managed.

We invite you to learn more or try out YugabyteDB today:

• Download YugabyteDB 2.17, installation takes just a few minutes.
• If you’re a startup, take advantage of the YugabyteDB Managed Quantum Leap program to get a $10,000 credit towards a YugabyteDB Managed database in production.
• If you’re an enterprise that hasn’t fully explored YugabyteDB Managed, then sign up for a free 30-day trial of a dedicated  production tier, with no credit card required.
• Join the YugabyteDB Slack Community for interactions with the broader YugabyteDB community and real-time discussions with our engineering teams.

NOTE: Following YugabyteDB release versioning standards, YugabyteDB 2.17 is a preview release. New features included are under active development and made available for development and testing projects.