February 2023 Summaries

I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with an MS in Computer Science in December 2022, and began my journey with Yugabyte through a smooth interview process that showcased the company's interest in me joining as a summer intern. I was impressed by the company culture, which emphasizes trust, relationships, and outcomes, and was trusted to work on impactful projects under mentorship from Catalin, who helped me overcome challenges and deliver highly impactful projects end-to-end. After two successful internships, I felt that continuing at Yugabyte as a full-time employee after graduation would be a great next step for my career, driven by the company's passion for technical excellence, its innovative approach to modernizing the database layer, and its leadership team's expertise in tackling complex problems. I was delighted to join the team full-time and am excited to tackle new challenges and contribute to the company's mission.

Fiserv is a global fintech and banking solution provider that handles over 1.5 trillion US dollars in processing, with Jay Duraisamy leading its newly established data and analytics division. The company aims to gather data from various business units, align it, and unlock its value to provide new services for merchant customers and consumers. Customer expectations are changing, with a focus on differentiated services and real-time access to data, which Fiserv is addressing by building a data platform that brings together data and analytics on one platform. This platform will enable the company to create a 360-degree view of customers and merchants, providing value through unique and shared services. Fiserv's data platform design considers connecting data from different business units, serving both batch and online modes, and maintaining historical data for batch processing. The team is building a hybrid architecture that combines on-prem and cloud-based tools, such as ETL tools, Kafka, Snowflake, and YugabyteDB, to provide real-time data access and scalability. Jay believes in a platform- and product-centric approach to measuring business value, identifying customer problems that traditional architecture cannot solve, and choosing the right architecture depending on the context and customer needs.

A distributed database like YugabyteDB achieves transactional consistency on an async standby by reading at a consistent timestamp equal to the minimum caught up time across all tablets in the database, ensuring atomicity and global ordering of transactions. This is achieved through cross-cluster replication, which replicates data from the active cluster to the standby with some lag, but ensures that reads occur at a safe time below which no new records can come in, preventing transactional violations like atomicity and global ordering issues. The tradeoff for achieving this consistency is staleness of reads and potential data loss on failover corresponding to the lag between active and standby.

Effortlessly Manage Your Multi-Cloud Environment with Yugabyte’s Cloud Resource Cleanup Yugabyte's cloud resource cleanup (CRC) is an open-source command line tool designed to simplify the management of multi-cloud infrastructure. With support for multiple cloud providers including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, CRC helps organizations streamline their cloud environment by identifying and deleting unused resources, resulting in cost savings and reduced security risks. The tool offers various features such as dry run mode, slack notifications, and age-based filtering to facilitate efficient resource management. By utilizing the SDKs provided by each platform, CRC allows users to preview resources without performing operations, making it easier to manage their cloud environment.

In this guide, GraalVM's AOT compilation is used to create native images for a Spring Boot application built with YugabyteDB's JDBC driver. This approach provides quicker startup times, on-demand horizontal scalability, less memory consumption, and better performance, making it suitable for cloud-scale applications. To get started, developers need to follow the prerequisites, including installing Gradle 7.5+, JDK 17+, and GraalVM 22.3.r17+. They can then use SDKMAN to install these dependencies and clone a sample repository that includes a simple JPA-based web application with CRUD functionality. The native build process requires more memory and takes longer than bytecode compilation, but it can be triggered using the `gradle nativeCompile` command. To overcome limitations in reachability metadata, developers can provide explicit runtime hints using annotations like `@ImportRuntimeHints`. The resulting native binary file can be run with the ysql profile to take advantage of the benefits of AOT compilation and GraalVM's native images.

YugabyteDB Managed is a managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) offering that provides a highly available control plane, idempotent cluster creations and edits, change control and quality assurance processes, security features such as redundant VPNs, VPCs, firewalls, and penetration testing, and support for both GCP and AWS. The service combines human expertise with automation to ensure reliability and scalability. It is designed to work with a variety of databases, including PostgreSQL, and supports geo-distributed clusters.

Yugabyte University has been named a finalist in the 2022 ACE Awards, recognizing its educational excellence in customer education. The university offers free self-paced courses, interactive builder workshops, virtual trainings, and professional certifications to help students achieve their career goals. With over 12,000 learners worldwide, YBU relies on a combination of systems, vendors, and home-grown technologies to create high-quality courseware and facilitate the learner experience. Its unique technology stack includes Thinkific Plus for learning platform, Gitpod for hands-on labs, Accredible for credential management, Zapier for marketing automation, and Synthesia for AI video production. Despite not winning the award, YBU is grateful for the recognition and looks forward to continuing to serve its global community of cloud native application developers and database practitioners.

YugabyteDB has successfully received the ISO 27001 certification for its distributed SQL database, demonstrating its commitment to security and data protection. This globally recognized standard is widely accepted as a benchmark for information security management systems, ensuring that organizations can trust Yugabyte's processes and controls. The certification validates the maturity of Yugabyte's security program, differentiating it from other offerings in the industry. With this achievement, Yugabyte continues to showcase its focus on defining, implementing, and following a comprehensive security program, earning the trust of some of the world's largest enterprises with critical data in production environments.

This has been an exciting year for YugabyteDB Managed, marked by significant growth in customer base, deployments of clusters in 40+ cloud regions globally, and a large number of active users on both free and paid tiers. The company's focus on innovation led to the introduction of features such as multi-region clusters, geo-partitioned clusters, read replicas, faster cluster deployment, more powerful instance types, and a data migration tool called Voyager that simplifies the transition from legacy databases. Additionally, YugabyteDB Managed has enhanced its management capabilities with configurable maintenance windows, cluster health status views, pause/resume functionality, Performance Advisor, and innovations in its core database to improve query performance. The company looks forward to continuing this momentum in the new year.

YugabyteDB uses RocksDB as its internal persistent data storage, which utilizes DocDB's highly customized document store. RocksDB's data compaction algorithms are used for performance and space optimization. Compactions in YugabyteDB aim to minimize read latency by reducing the number of files accessed to find a key-value pair, and also serve as a form of garbage collection by purging unnecessary data from disk during compaction. The type of background compaction algorithm used is size amplification or read amplification, which trigger when certain thresholds are reached regarding file sizes and read amplifications. In YugabyteDB, TServer flags can be used to tune compaction resources, including the number of threads assigned to a thread pool for compactions and flushes, as well as limits on SST files allowed per tablet to help prevent behind-on-compaction issues. Full compactions are scheduled to improve cluster performance by minimizing space amplification and improving read performance over time.