### YugabyteDB 2.1 General Availability YugabyteDB 2.1 has reached general availability with almost 70 new enhancements and fixes. The release builds on the scalable and fault-tolerant design inspired by Google Spanner, offering an open-source, high-performance distributed SQL database. Key features include geo-distributed, multi-cloud clusters, two data center deployments for reducing cross-DC write latency, read replicas for reducing cross-DC read latency, performance improvements in Yugabyte SQL, enterprise-grade security enhancements, and beta features such as Yugabyte Cloud as a fully-managed DBaaS, colocated tables for reducing JOIN latency, yugabyted for simplifying getting started UX, Change Data Capture (CDC) for streaming data out to external systems, new & improved ecosystem integrations, and more.