Today’s public and private clouds are built to run cloud-native applications architected for shared-nothing, scale-out, commodity infrastructure that can fail often. They give enterprises easy access to a number of geo-distributed datacenters for increased availability and fault-tolerance but also require application developers to think about infrastructure agility, data locality and cross-datacenter replication. Mission-critical applications with their strict need for data correctness and availability have thus become significantly challenging to run on modern cloud infrastructure.

Current generation of operational databases were never built to solve the above challenges. Strongly consistent scale-out SQL databases, that started out as sharding and clustering layers on top of monolithic SQL databases (such as MySQL and Postgres), provide the much needed data correctness guarantees but are only fit for private datacenters interconnected with highly reliable custom networks. Eventually consistent NoSQL databases (such as Cassandra and MongoDB) provide higher availability but do not provide strong guarantees around data consistency or zero data loss during failures.

In this session, we will review the architecture and design of YugaByte DB, a new open source, cloud-native database purpose-built for mission-critical applications. YugaByte DB provides a strongly consistent core similar to SQL databases while also enabling multi-datacenter high availability similar to NoSQL databases. Stateful applications can now easily scale up and scale down in both public and private cloud platforms without incurring operational complexity or losing data during failures.