YugabyteDB Open Source Community Update – May 2021

We started off 2021 strong with exciting announcements, including:

• The launch of Yugabyte University including free training and certification options
• A successful Distributed SQL Summit Asia event, with 35 amazing speakers across 3 days
• A $48M round of funding to accelerate all distributed SQL activities across the board
• YugabyteDB turns 5 years old and Karthik Ranganathan, CTO and Co-Founder, shared perspectives from the last 5 years in building a cloud native distributed database

And just this week we announced our latest release, YugabyteDB 2.7. Open source software like this doesn’t happen without an awesome open source community backing it. We’d like to take the opportunity to call out some YugabyteDB community highlights so far this year.

Our commitment to open source

First, it is worth restating that YugabyteDB doesn’t pay lip service to open source like other database projects. We don’t trick you into downloading software that has time-bombed enterprise features that you can “try,” but ultimately have to “buy”. Advanced features like read replicas, encryption, change data capture, and multi-master async replication are all freely available under the Apache 2.0 license. To learn more about our commitment to open source, check out, “Why we changed YugabyteDB licensing to 100% open source.”

Over 660,000 (and counting) distributed SQL clusters deployed

At Yugabyte, we are honored to have an enthusiastic and growing community and we aim to keep the momentum going strong. One of the community metrics we track as it relates to community growth is usage of YugabyteDB.. The number of YugabyteDB clusters created has been increasing at 10x year over year.

We are very excited to share that over 600,000 unique YugabyteDB clusters have been deployed in the lifetime of the project! These numbers were measured using opt-in call home diagnostics, so likely the actual number of clusters deployed thus far is much higher.

The sky-rocketing usage numbers indicate that YugabyteDB addresses a lot of critical use cases for developers, which can be realized relatively quickly. Developers can also get productive with YugabyteDB extremely quickly, which is not surprising given the re-use of the PostgreSQL query layer in the YSQL API, dramatically simplifying the learning curve to getting started and building a cloud native application.

If you haven’t already, install YugabyteDB and let us know what you think.

3,300+ community Slack members

We know that development teams working on fast moving projects with tight timelines need to get answers to their questions quickly from the folks who are actively developing YugabyteDB. They also want to exchange learnings with experienced community members who have “been there and done that.”

YugabyteDB’s Slack channel is the community’s “center of gravity” on the Internet for helping make everyone’s project a success. At the end of March  it became over 3,000 members strong. You can join the conversation here, our community is standing by!

2,200+ students enrolled and 450+ certifications granted

Since November 2020, over 2,200 developers have enrolled in courses and over 450 have passed certification exams. Congratulations go to Haranto Ario Widjaya from Singapore for being the first person to pass the YSQL Development Fundamentals exam!

Missed one of our FREE previous trainings or would like to attend a future one? Make sure to sign up for the YugabyteDB Community Slack and join the #training channel. This is where we will be making announcements about upcoming training events, new courses, and certifications. The next training we’ll be offering is happening on May 27, 2021 – sign up for “YugabyteDB DBA Fundamentals” here.

Aside from virtual, instructor-led training we have also started to offer FREE online courses on Udemy:

• Distributed SQL and YugabyteDB Fundamentals (Rated 4.6 out 5 stars!)

Again, the #training channel on YugabyteDB Community Slack is the best place to be among the first to find out about upcoming training and certifications.

188 contributors to open source

We recently reached 188 contributors to the YugabyteDB project on GitHub who have helped make the core database software more functional, faster, and more reliable. Are you ready to make a contribution? Check out our contributors documentation on how to get started.

Here’s a shoutout to a few of our more recent contributors along the way:

• GitHub user triump2020 has contributed to these 4 PRs and has another one open.
• Basil has been supporting us with a Yugabyte Rust Crud example, something he plans on continuing to add to as bandwidth allows. Here is a link to the main GitHub repository where you can check it out.
• Community Slack user Andy provided us with a Python ORM example and pyDAL script that we will be adding to our documentation as well.

Reference to all of our contributors can be found on our GitHub page here. Come join the party!

Recapping Distributed SQL Summit Asia 2021

We held the Distributed SQL Summit Asia in India Standard Time across three days earlier this year. We had more than 750 attendees, 35 speakers and MCs “on stage” in the virtual event platform, and produced 900 minutes of content across the three days in a mix of recorded presentations with live Q&A.

People attend events like the Summit to learn from industry experts. We were so grateful to have had keynote presentations from Walmart, Weaveworks, and HashiCorp. As well as informative sessions from other innovative companies including: Astronomer, BRIKL, Buoyant, CAST AI, Hasura, InfraCloud, Infosys, Liquibase, Manetu, Softtech, Virtusa, VMware, Wipro Digital, and Xignite. The talks were highly informative and the audience feedback was very positive.

Since the event was virtual, so was our swag. We donated $5 USD for every attendee who redeemed their virtual swag by selecting a charity to receive their $5. Together, swag redemptions ended up in more than $2,000 USD being donated across three charities.

If you weren’t able to attend the Distributed SQL Summit Asia, or if you want to rewatch some of your favorites, you can find the recordings in the showcase on Vimeo or the playlist on YouTube.

YugabyteDB Community Meetups

Looks like the majority of events, both big and small will continue to be virtual this year with some returning with a scaled back or hybrid physical presence. Due to popular demand we have added four new YugabyteDB Users Group Meetups this year in Berlin, London, Singapore, and Toronto. Sign up to learn when upcoming events will be scheduled and to suggest topics.

• Austin
• Bangalore
• Berlin
• Boston
• Chicago
• London
• Minneapolis
• New York City
• San Francisco 
• Seattle
• Silicon Valley
• Singapore
• Toronto

1,200+ YugabyteDB community rewards sent worldwide

Since we started our Community Rewards program last year, we have mailed over 1,200 limited edition t-shirts destined to over 80 countries to sharp-eyed developers who have spotted the easter egg hidden in plain sight in the YugabyteDB admin UI. Want a reward for yourself? It’s simple, just install YugabyteDB on the platform of your choice and have a look around.

We are hiring!

Yugabyte continues to hire across all roles in all regions! Although we are based in Silicon Valley, we hire exceptional folks wherever they are. There are about 30 open jobs currently at Yugabyte, and even more in the broader technology industry including our customers, users, and partners. Check out our most recent hiring blog post for a list of current openings and more.