A Thanksgiving Toast to Two Years of Achievements with YugabyteDB

As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches, we at Yugabyte wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on two eventful years with YugabyteDB Managed. Our platform was born from the desire to redefine managed database services by leveraging the strength of our open source database—YugabyteDB— within the simplicity of a turnkey, cloud-based service.

In the spirit of the season, we want to take a moment to express our gratitude to all our customers, partners, and community members for their invaluable engagement, which has been instrumental in transforming YugabyteDB Managed into the robust and scalable service it is today. It has been a period of significant achievements, driven by dedication to technical excellence and responsive evolution based on real-world use and feedback.

An Analytical View Into Our Performance

As a data-driven company, we know that numbers paint a vivid picture and provide clear insights. With that in mind, here are some key metrics that showcase the progress and growth of YugabyteDB Managed:

1. Monthly Active Users (MAU): Our MAU has climbed 166% year-over-year, reaching approximately 1,000 monthly active users.
2. Community Growth: Over the past year, there have been over 11,000 new sign-ups within the YugabyteDB Managed community, a testament to our platform’s expanding user engagement and application development potential.
3. Cluster Management: By overseeing more than 14,000 clusters, we’ve achieved a 225% growth over the past year. A big thank you to our hard-working SRE and DevOps teams, who flawlessly support and manage this large environment for our customers.
4. Beyond Regional Boundaries: With a huge focus on our customers’ needs, we are there to support them as they push boundaries and innovate. We’ve seen customers deploy across single and multiple regions, with one deploying a 288 vCPU setup across three regions, and another implementing a 224 vCPU, 14-node configuration in one region. One customer has even deployed a geo-partitioned, multi-region cluster across eight global regions to support strict data residency requirements as they expand into new countries.
5. Uptime Excellence: Uptime is often the gold standard for database services. Our 100% database uptime and 99.99% control plane uptime underscores our commitment to reliability and high availability.

Our Customers’ Favorite Features

Multi-region clusters top the list of customer-favorite features, offering on-demand scalability and built-in resilience in a dynamic cloud environment. In today’s connected digital ecosystem, the ability to decentralize and distribute data across different regions is highly valued for its numerous benefits.

Enhanced Latency Management:

• Context: Business growth across continents means serving data to a worldwide audience, which often introduces latency challenges due to the distances involved.
• Benefit: Multi-region clusters help overcome this by strategically locating resources closer to end-users, providing consistently low latencies and improved global user experiences.

Robust Resilience and Fault Tolerance:

• Context: The digital realm is prone to outages—from software glitches or infrastructure failures. This downtime not only negatively impacts user trust but can have significant financial repercussions.
• Benefit: Our multi-region clusters are highly resilient. They’re built to withstand various types of outages, including node crashes, availability zone (AZ) glitches, and regional failures. This results in an uninterrupted service. Even if a fault occurs in one region, your application will continue to function (with no issues), courtesy of the db resources located in other regions.

Adherence to Data Regulations:

• Context: With digital privacy laws becoming stricter around the globe, non-compliance isn’t an option. The hefty penalties and reputational risks involved are simply too much.
• Benefit: Multi-region clusters with geo-partitioning capability are a huge advantage for businesses navigating this intricate regulatory maze. Data can reside within specific geographical boundaries, ensuring compliance with data residency laws and privacy regulations.

Scalability and Performance Optimization:

• Context: Growing businesses face increasing data demands, which can strain traditional databases, causing performance bottlenecks and scalability challenges.
• Benefit: YugabyteDB clusters are designed for growth. Whether it’s accommodating a surge in regional user traffic or ramping up performance metrics, our database clusters can always be effortlessly scaled. This ensures that you business remains always agile, responsive, and primed for optimal performance.

NOTE: Did you know that YugabyteDB Managed boasts over 170+ key user capabilities (not including the additional innovations in our core database?)

Transforming our Customers’ Database Experience

But it hasn’t just been about numbers and favorites. These last two years have been about the transformative experiences YugabyteDB Management has brought to our users:

A Focus on Application Development, Not Database Operations:

• Benefit: With YugabyteDB Managed, we take over the nitty-gritty of database administration duties, freeing you to focus on innovation and building cutting-edge applications.
• User Insight: Reclaim countless hours that could be used to enhance your apps’ and dive deep into your application’s core functionalities, design, and user experience as we ensure smooth database operations behind the scenes.

The Power of Simplified Database Management:

• Benefit: YugabyteDB Managed simplifies database management with over 170 features. From intuitive tools to smart automation, every feature is tailored to ensure ease of use. This includes scaling clusters, backups, setting up security, and countless more capabilities.
• User Insight: Shift away from manual processes to a system where database operations are not only efficient and swift but also API-centric, and (dare we say) enjoyable.

Grow When You Need To With On-Demand Scalability:

• Benefit: Growth is thrilling, but scaling tech infrastructure to match that growth? Not so much. Our managed service changes that narrative by simplifying it. We offer scalable database solutions that grow as your business does. Effortlessly.
• User Insight: Whether it is a sudden increase in users, new market/region expansion, or new services, YugabyteDB Managed delivers scalability in an instant, so you’re always ahead of demand.

Our Milestones: A Stroll Down Memory Lane

Every journey has a story, a lesson, and a memory so we thought we’d share some key highlights:

• The Hackathon Chronicles: The YugabyteDB Managed Hackathon was a hub of innovation. Teams from around the world collaborated, transforming innovative ideas into real-world features available today. One example is the YugabyteDB Managed CLI, which evolved from an idea at a hackathon to an integral feature.
• Launching Azure: Our Azure launch was more than just a technical achievement; it was a testament to the team’s resilience and collaborative spirit. Even more impressive than the six-month development and deployment cycle was the rapid customer adoption. Our first customer went live just two weeks after launch. We continue to support AWS and Google Cloud, with the goal of making it as easy as possible to use YugabyteDB on any cloud of choice.
• Testing Our Limits with Incognito Projects: Have you heard about companies secretly testing their products in James Bond style? That’s exactly what we do with our ‘Incognito Projects’! Our teams, disguised with imaginary fake mustaches and playful aliases, thoroughly and unconventionally test our database and managed service. They don’t just use it; they creatively misuse it. It’s our version of the “What’s the wildest thing that can happen?” challenge.

In one such operation, our ‘undercover agents’ decided to run tests that would stress out specific system parts (because why not?) The outcome? Our SRE team went into superhero mode, metaphorically donning capes to resolve the crisis. Just when they were about to save the day, the big reveal came—everything had been orchestrated by our own people! Imagine the scene: alarms ringing, teams hustling, followed by a burst of laughter when the truth was revealed.

But why these elaborate internal pranks? It’s our quirky way to step into our customers’ shoes. By being the most unpredictable users of our service, we gain real insights into how it operates. This approach helps us assess reliability, spot potential issues, and continually refine our tools, ensuring our customers get nothing short of perfection.

So, our ‘Incognito Projects’ are more than just fun and games; they represent our commitment to excellence, infused with a sense of humor, a little bit of mischief, and a lot of team spirit.

Customer Chronicles: Why They Chose YugabyteDB Managed?

We’re always grateful to hear some positive feedback from actual users who have successfully leveraged YugabyteDB to manage and capitalize on their data. Here is what five actual users had to say.

“In our quest for the perfect database solution, we did a thorough evaluation, considering other players in the market like CockroachDB, ScyllaDB, MongoDB, Planetscale, and SurrealDB. YugabyteDB, however, stood out with its unparalleled Postgres compatibility and its distributed architecture, ticking all our boxes. This was particularly crucial for us in handling ACID transactions within our financial payment systems.

An interesting note is that our API services are primarily written in Rust. YugabyteDB’s Postgres compatibility meant we could simply exchange the credentials in the postgres driver, and everything worked like a charm. This was a huge relief as many other database solutions didn’t even offer a Rust driver due to its relatively new emergence in the tech scene.”

“Our engagement with YugabyteDB feels personalized and valued. The rapid responses and the depth of support make us feel like we’re in safe hands.”

“The fusion of relational and non-relational capabilities is like a dream come true. It offers the flexibility and robustness we’ve always craved.”

“For any modern application seeking reliability, scalability, and sheer performance, YugabyteDB stands out. Its multi-API support, coupled with built-in sharding and replication, is a game-changer.”

“Every interaction reaffirms our decision to choose YugabyteDB. The product’s resilience is matched by the professionalism of the team behind it.”

>>>For more in-depth customer stories, please visit our 7-in-7 customer success series >>>

Onwards and Upwards

The last two years have brought significant growth and learning. We’re eager to continue evolving, fueled by valuable feedback, customer enthusiasm, and our dedicated team.

Finally, we wanted to say a huge “THANK YOU” to our YugabyteDB community. Your feedback, participation, and enthusiasm will continue to be a source of inspiration as we continue to innovate and grow.

We look forward to scaling new heights and conquering new challenges in the months and years to come!

Oh, One More Thing…

Here are our favorite ways to get started with YugabyteDB Managed! If you’ve made it this far and aren’t a YBM user yet, here’s what to do next:

1. Attend a Thursday demo to see geo-partitioning in action
2. Sign up for a full-featured, free trial of YugabyteDB Managed to give geo-partitioning a try
3. Visit our Docs and Blog space to discover how you can build a global application with YugabyteDB

Finally, check out our 7-in-7 customer series to learn more about customers who are using YugabyteDB Managed in real-life situations.