You have YugabyteDB installed, but want to secure the connection using TLS. To do this, you need to elevate the insecure connection to a secure one using STARTTLS, which is referred to as "opportunistic TLS". This requires a version of OpenSSL >= 1.1.1 and an additional command line option -starttls postgres. You can use the following command: openssl s_client -starttls postgres -connect xxx.xxx.xx.xxx:5433. Additionally, you need to know that the number of tablets (shards) needed for your cluster can be changed at the tserver or table/index level. The default tablet number is 8 for most production workloads, but this can be explicitly set or changed during creation using commands like bin/yb-ctl --rf=3 create --ysql_num_shards_per_tserver=1. You also need to know that column type conversion in YugabyteDB currently only supports increasing the size of varchar and varbit types, and does not yet support altering data types in a distributed cluster. To convert column types, you can use one of two methods: creating a new column with the correct type and moving the data over, or creating a new table with the correct column types and moving the data over. The YugabyteDB development team is working to eventually support all main ALTER TABLE commands and variants.