YugabyteDB 2.4 GA

February 10, 2021

YugabyteDB 2.4 comes with hardened enterprise-grade security features, enhanced multi-region deployment capabilities, and performance improvements. The newest iteration of Yugabyte’s open source database improves on the existing high availability, horizontal scalability, and ease-of-use characteristics of YugabyteDB, furthering the company’s mission of providing the default distributed SQL database for cloud-native applications in a multi-cloud world.

As enterprises deploy applications across multiple geographic regions and clouds, they often struggle to provide the efficiency and scalability needed to meet global user demands while simultaneously complying with local data regulations (e.g., GDPR). The release of YugabyteDB 2.4 stabilizes the features and capabilities included in the YugabyteDB 2.3 development release. With this latest release, organizations can now distribute data across geographic regions with low latency and high performance. These new multi-region capabilities paired with key security features for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) integrations, audit logging, and code audit and penetration testing strengthen YugabyteDB’s position as the most secure open source distributed SQL database for cloud-native and multi-region deployments with the most complete set of PostgreSQL-compatible features.

“Yugabyte is building the distributed SQL database for the cloud-native world,” said Karthik Ranganathan, CTO, Yugabyte. “The release of YugabyteDB 2.4 accelerates our mission of providing the distributed database of choice for multi-cloud environments. The combination of the major software enhancements and enterprise-grade security features available in 2.4 enables our customers to better extract full value from their data in production-grade environments, providing the comprehensive database solution needed to maximize cloud investments.”

Key features of the YugabyteDB 2.4 release include:

Highly scalable and resilient GraphQL apps with Hasura: YugabyteDB can now support applications built on Hasura GraphQL Engine to ensure resilience to failures and scalability to millions of live subscriptions. Read more about the results obtained by running benchmarks in a Kubernetes cluster with Hasura GraphQL Engine and YugabyteDB.

Apache Spark 3 integration was performed via certification of the Yugabyte Spark Connector with Apache Spark 3. Apache Spark has become the de-facto standard framework for distributed scale-out data processing. This release enables you to use the latest features of Apache Spark 3 with the Yugabyte YCQL API. As a part of this integration, the Yugabyte YCQL driver has been certified with the latest version of Apache Cassandra 4.6.n.
Simplified cluster administration: The release includes several useful extensions such as pg_stat_statements, uuid-ossp, and pgcrypto, which are all pre-installed and loaded into YugabyteDB by default. Additionally, within Yugabyte Platform, a management platform for building your private DBaaS, new alerts and monitoring capabilities have been added through the ‘Live Queries’ dashboard that allows administrators to gain insights into how the database is performing.

Enterprise-grade security features: The YSQL API can now be configured to authenticate users using LDAP as the password verification method. LDAP allows users to use a single password to connect to multiple services, including connecting to databases and running queries against them. Yugabyte 2.4 also introduces support for audit logging in YCQL and YSQL to allow administrators to track activity related to data access and help users quickly analyze the extent of any potential data breach. Yugabyte has completed a security and penetration testing audit to further validate that YugabyteDB can be safely deployed in production, specifically in industries with the strongest security requirements.

Data at rest encryption with Thales Vormetric has been added as a result of Yugabyte becoming a certified partner of Thales Vormetric, bringing enterprise-grade encryption features to Yugabyte. YugabyteDB interoperates with Thales Vormetric Transparent Encryption (VTE) to secure sensitive data, allowing you to protect yourself from a wide range of risks posed by malicious hackers or database administrators with privileged data access. YugabyteDB supports encrypted backups that ensure safety and security of sensitive data.

Support for VMware Tanzu has been added to Yugabyte Platform as one of the cloud provider configurations. VMware Tanzu allows you to build, run, and manage Kubernetes-based containerized applications. Yugabyte Platform has been officially certified and made available in the VMware Marketplace. This configuration works with Tanzo Kubernetes Grid, Tanzo Kubernetes Grid Integrated, and is about to be certified with Tanzo Kubernetes Grid Multi-Cloud.

YugabyteDB 2.4 features are available under Yugabyte’s completely open source Apache 2.0 license. In July 2019, Yugabyte announced its commitment to 100% open source and since then, YugabyteDB’s footprint continues to grow at a rapid pace with community members having deployed +575,000 clusters to date. The project’s contributor count is now more than 170, with +2,500 community Slack members, and more than 300 certifications granted in the last 90 days.