YugabyteDB 2.1 is now generally available, offering significant performance improvements, geo-distributed deployment scenarios, and enterprise-grade security enhancements. The new release features a 10x increase in Yugabyte SQL performance, production-ready multi-cloud clusters, and enhanced data encryption and key management capabilities. Additionally, Yugabyte Cloud, a fully-managed pay-as-you-go cloud service, is now available, along with colocated tables for reducing JOIN latency and yugabyted for simplifying getting started UX. Change Data Capture, distributed transactional backups, and deep ecosystem integrations are also new or improved features in the 2.1 release. The YugabyteDB community has experienced phenomenal growth over the last two years, and the project continues to attract developers and organizations looking for a cloud-native, distributed SQL database solution.