Yugabyte Fires Up New DBaaS Targeting Cloud Application Development

The next-generation database vendor promises simplicity, scalability and availability with Yugabyte Cloud for businesses looking to develop new cloud software and migrate legacy applications to the cloud.

Next-generation database developer Yugabyte launched Yugabyte Cloud this week in a move that provides developers and users with a fully managed database-as-a-service for building new cloud-based applications and moving legacy applications to cloud platforms.

Yugabyte Cloud, based on the company’s YugabyteDB distributed SQL database, is designed to provide developers with the underlying advantages of the cloud, including scalability and availability, while allowing them to focus on the applications themselves.

“As a database, we want to make it simple for people building cloud-native applications,” said Karthik Ranganathan, Yugabyte co-founder and CTO, in an interview with CRN. “A lot of applications can benefit from the cloud and can move to the cloud.”

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Ranganathan said Yugabyte is seeing interest from both SMBs and enterprise businesses in database-as-a-service.

“I think people are getting more comfortable with database-as-a-service,” he said. “Yugabyte Cloud is just another step in that evolution where we’re making building cloud applications even more effortless.”

More than 1,000 businesses and organizations have been using the beta version of Yugabyte Cloud in recent months, according to the company. Ranganathan said the DBaaS is being used for developing new cloud applications and for migrating legacy on-premises applications to a cloud platform.

“The focus is really on moving some of these applications to the cloud,” Ranganathan said. “Enterprises want to get into a situation where they can build a strong foundation to innovate and build even more applications, even more microservices, in the future. The first step is to modernize the applications and the database needs to be modernized with it.”

Database-as-a-service offerings have proliferated in the last two years with a number of database vendors, including MariaDB, Cockroach Labs, and SingleStore, launching DBaaS offerings. In addition to providing greater scalability and availability, fully managed cloud databases allow business to worry less about database management and administration chores than with on-premises database systems.

Yugabyte said it applies best practices to securely manage its cloud database and underlying infrastructure, providing such capabilities as daily backups, non-disruptive software upgrades, continuous availability, database usage monitoring, logging and audit, identity and access management, data encryption and key rotation.

“When it comes to cloud databases, attributes like resilience, scalability, geo-distribution, and security are paramount, as is a common control interface in an increasingly distributed world. But it’s rare for one database to excel at every one of these points,” said Mike Leone, a senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, in a statement.

“Yugabyte’s Postgres compatible database offers linear scalability, proven resilience, cross-tool and environment compatibility, and built-in security developed from the ground up to eliminate tradeoffs. When you combine all of this, it makes for one of the most powerful and compelling databases on the market.”

Yugabyte Cloud is priced based on the number of CPUs used in the distributed database environment with customers able to choose between pay-as-you-go pricing and an annual subscription option. Yugabyte also offers a perpetual free tier of the cloud service.

Yugabyte Cloud is based on YugabyteDB, the company’s next-generation distributed SQL database that is compatible with the open-source PostgreSQL database.

The launch of Yugabyte Cloud comes just a month after Yugabyte debuted YugabyteDB 2.9, a new edition of the database software that pushes the capabilities of relational database technology for cloud-native transactional applications.

The 2.9 release includes the Yugabyte Smart Driver for SQL, a JDBC client driver that boosts application performance and fault tolerance by connecting to any node in a distributed SQL database cluster without the need for an external load balancer. YugabyteDB 2.9 also offers point-in-time recovery, distributed transactional backups and transactional savepoints, and a reduction in network bandwidth usage through RPC compression.