03/03/2021

Enterprise

YugabyteDB: Distributed SQL Has Arrived

As more applications are built with microservices-based architectures, monolithic applications are giving way to composable sets of loosely coupled services, each of which requires a database that scales gracefully and runs well in the cloud, where most modern microservices are run.

YugabyteDB is a cloud-native, open source, transactional database designed to be a system of record for business critical applications that demand resilience, scalability, and global data distribution. A fully elastic and strongly consistent data fabric, YugabyteDB can span environments across multiple cloud providers and on-premises as well.

YugabyteDB’s Layered Architecture: Query Layer and Distributed Document Store

Building transactional databases for the cloud is not trivial. Fittingly, the founding team at Yugabyte is deeply technical, having built other open source data infrastructure systems like Cassandra and HBase and scaled cloud-native data platforms at Facebook before starting Yugabyte.

The team’s prior experience building open source technology is paying off: The YugabyteDB community has grown to over 2,700 Slack members, more than 170 contributors, and over 600,000 installed clusters to date.

Yugabyte has built a strong solution for applications leveraging these new microservices paradigms. Where other technologies make compromises, introducing new flavors of SQL or missing advanced functionality, YugabyteDB brings PostgreSQL to the cloud while maintaining its core advantages as a database management system. This makes YugabyteDB an ideal technology for both building new applications and modernizing legacy applications as well, enabling frictionless migration of existing workloads.

We think YugabyteDB will become the standard for distributed SQL in the cloud, and we’re not alone. YugabyteDB is landing in a diverse set of organizations, from Walmart scaling product mappings during peak retail season to cutting edge quantitative trading firms like Hudson River Trading. Reasons enterprises choose YugabyteDB are as diverse as their respective verticals, but a few themes consistently emerge in customer conversations:

  • Resilience and high availability: Zero downtime for mission critical applications
  • Horizontal scalability: Gracefully scale on-demand to +300,000 transactions per second, +100 TBs of data, and thousands of concurrent connections, as proven in production environments
  • Geo-distributed clusters: Distribute data across multiple zones, regions, or clouds while maintaining consistency
  • PostgreSQL compatibility: Brings advanced, cloud-native functionality to the familiar context of PostgreSQL

At Lightspeed, we are big believers in the distributed cloud and are investing meaningfully into cloud-native data infrastructure supporting that long-term thesis. We’re excited to announce we’ve led a $48M funding round in Yugabyte, doubling down on our prior investments in the company.

As supporters of the company since their Series A, we’ve been impressed by the immense progress the team has made, the momentum in the business, and the strength of the open source community. Today we’re proud to deepen our partnership with Bill, Kannan, Karthik, Mikhail and the entire Yugabyte team.

— Ravi Mhatre & Nnamdi Iregbulem, Partners at Lightspeed

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