At the recent Distributed SQL Summit, Yugabyte announced the general availability of Yugabyte Cloud, a database-as-a-service version of the Postgres compatible YugabyteDB.
An open source distributed SQL database, YugabyteDB is a single logical relational database, released under the Apache 2.0 license, that distributes data over multiple compute instances. Each instance is a node in a database cluster and provides a SQL-compatible distributed query layer.
Yugabyte Cloud manages the deployment of YugabyteDB and abstracts the underlying differences among cloud providers, providing distributed transactions with global consistency. The cloud service lets users deploy globally choosing any of the regions of the main providers. Currently Yugabyte Cloud is available for production on AWS and Google Cloud, with support for Azure deployments expected soon. Chirag Narang, product lead at Yugabyte, writes:
Developers love YugabyteDB for its Postgres compatibility, linear scalability and resilience, but don’t want to worry about the infrastructure, operations, and toil of DBA tasks. Not all enterprises have the expertise and knowledge to oversee all the functions and understand all of the intricacies of running distributed databases in cloud environments. That’s why developers love Yugabyte Cloud.
Yugabyte cloud supports geo-distribution using synchronous and asynchronous replication. In a recent podcast, Karthik Ranganathan, founder and CTO at Yugabyte, summarizes the main goals of the new service:
We need a relational database that can run in the cloud to satisfy just three properties...availability, scale, and geographic distribution.
In a Yugabyte’s tweet, he adds:
Yugabyte is going to stick to the highest-grade RDBMS features so we are the only database that completely reuses the upper half of Postgres.
The presentation YugaByte DB - A Planet-Scale Database for Low Latency Transactional Apps by Ranganathan and Amey Banarse, VP of products at YugaByte, is available on InfoQ.
Yugabyte is not the only company promoting managed distributed SQL databases, with CockroachDB offering CockroachCloud. Both Cockroach Labs and Yugabyte have released in the past benchmarks to highlight the advantages of their own solutions. Franck Pachot, developer advocate at Yugabyte and AWS Data Hero, recently tweeted the results of his tests comparing the performances of YugabyteDB and PostgreSQL to demonstrate the linear and predictable scalability of YugabyteDB.
Source: https://github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db/issues/10108
Yugabyte Cloud can be purchased through the AWS and GCP marketplaces and includes a free tier, a perpetually free community supported YugabyteDB cluster for educational and non-production use. The production tier is designed for applications that require configurability and enterprise support and starts at $0.25/hr, with the pricing based on the number of vCPUs.