April 2022 Summaries

We recently held the second annual Distributed SQL Summit (DSS) Asia conference, which took place on March 30-31, 2022. The event was a two-day online conference featuring engaging presentations, discussions, and demos from customers, partners, and experts. A total of 35 sessions were available to attendees, with over 40 speakers sharing their expertise on distributed SQL and cloud-native architecture. The conference served as a platform for industry experts, advocates, partners, customers, and users to meet and learn about the benefits of distributed SQL and Yugabyte's open-source solutions. This year's event was notable for its dedicated Japanese Track and valued input from partners who have worked closely with Yugabyte over the years. The event also featured a grand lucky draw with Amazon gift cards as prizes, and all recordings are available on demand through Vimeo and YouTube. We are grateful to our speakers, customers, partners, and attendees, who made this year's DSS Asia 2022 a success.

A modern GraphQL API layer requires both horizontal scalability and high availability to support cloud native applications, which can be achieved by deploying a database such as YugabyteDB across multiple availability zones and utilizing cloud native services like Hasura Cloud. YugabyteDB provides a PostgreSQL-compliant database with built-in Raft consensus protocol for achieving high availability, while Hasura Cloud offers automatic scaling and infrastructure management for horizontal scalability. By connecting these two components, developers can create a scalable and resilient GraphQL API layer that can withstand zone-level outages and scale horizontally to meet the demands of their applications.

The author of this text successfully migrated an e-commerce application from on-premise to cloud native using Next.js, GraphQL engine, PostgreSQL, and other frameworks. They replaced the original architecture with cloud native counterparts such as YugabyteDB, Hasura Cloud, and Vercel. The migration process involved three main lessons learned: PostgreSQL compatibility matters significantly, cloud native services are easy to switch to, and zero code changes are a myth. The author had to make some adjustments to their code to ensure proper functionality with the new software and services, but overall, the experience was smooth and relatively painless.

To integrate Ebean ORM with YugabyteDB, you need to start a YugabyteDB cluster on your local engine and create a new Java-based Play Framework application. You can then create a simple REST API using Ebean ORM on YugabyteDB by defining an Employee model and an EmployeeController that stores and retrieves employee information in the database. The process involves installing YugabyteDB, creating a new Play Framework project, configuring Ebean and YugabyteDB, and compiling and running the server to test the API endpoints. Additionally, you can explore more use cases and testing support for Ebean ORM with YugabyteDB by checking out the Github issue and orm-examples repository.

A distributed SQL database offers several benefits when run in Kubernetes, including better resource utilization by automatically allocating resources to the best nodes, elastic scaling of pod resources dynamically through horizontal and vertical pod autoscalers, consistency and portability across clouds, on-premises, and edge environments with infrastructure orchestration, out-of-the-box infrastructure orchestration that handles stateful workloads, and automated Day 2 operations such as backups and software upgrades.

The text discusses the importance of geo-distributed databases in modern applications, particularly those built using cloud native architectures and serverless frameworks. The author shares their experience with YugabyteDB, a fully-managed cloud-native database that provides horizontal scalability, availability during major cloud region outages, and hybrid cloud deployments. They highlight how easy it is to deploy and connect to a geo-distributed database instance, even for developers without extensive distributed system expertise. The author focuses on the key aspects of creating a Java application using YugabyteDB as the geo-distributed database, including database deployment, connectivity, basic CRUD operations, and closing thoughts on the ease of use of such databases.

YugabyteDB provides client-to-server encryption in transit to secure communication between SQL clients and its PostgresQL query interface, achieving the goals of making it impossible to snoop or modify network communications, enabling the client to identify and verify the server, and enabling the server to identify and verify the client. To enable this, yb-tserver processes are configured with specific command line flags, including `--use_client_to_server_encryption=true` and specifying directories for certificates in PEM format. SQL clients can be configured to use these settings, which also enables verification of server certificates and mutual TLS when both goals are achieved. Additionally, organizations can specify a minimum SSL version using the `ssl_min_protocol_version` parameter, and Yugabyte Platform offers support for custom CAs and CA-signed certificates for private DBaaS deployments.