Discover how YugabyteDB powers scalable, resilient databases for modern enterprises. Amey Banarse shares insights on AI, the cloud, and the future of data management.
The rise of cloud-native architectures, AI-driven applications, and globally distributed systems has reshaped the database landscape, pushing enterprises to seek solutions that balance performance, resilience, and scalability. Enter YugabyteDB, a distributed SQL database designed to help organizations future-proof their infrastructure.
In this conversation, Amey Banarse, Field CTO and VP of Solutions Engineering at Yugabyte, shares insights on the evolving database ecosystem, the role of distributed SQL in modern application development, and how businesses can navigate cloud-native transformations with minimal complexity. He also discusses YugabyteDB’s PostgreSQL compatibility, its open-source approach, and the key trends shaping the future of enterprise databases.
What challenges led to YugabyteDB’s creation, and how can CTOs and CDOs use distributed SQL to future-proof their infrastructure?
Yugabyte Inc., the company behind YugabyteDB, was co-founded by Karthik Ranganathan, Kannan Muthukkaruppan, and Mikhail Bautin in 2016. As three of the original database engineers at Facebook, they were responsible for building distributed databases, including Apache Cassandra, RocksDB, and HBase. During that time, they saw a gap in the market for cloud-native transactional databases for business-critical applications. As organizations transitioned from on-premises to cloud-native operations, YugabyteDB was born out of the critical need for a database that utilizes the capabilities of non-relational databases and cloud-native architectures.
YugabyteDB’s distributed SQL architecture offers the scalability, high availability, and resilience that data and tech leaders need to strengthen their infrastructure and run business-critical applications. With its ability to support modern microservices and geographic distribution, YugabyteDB ensures systems can efficiently scale up and down as needed to adapt to evolving business requirements.
To understand how CTOs and CDOs can leverage distributed SQL databases like YugabyteDB to future-proof their infrastructure, take the example of this Global Retailer whose system of record supports a vast product catalog across multiple counties. Each item—from a Nike t-shirt in various colors to an iPad offered by multiple vendors—requires a unique global identifier. YugabyteDB ensured that data was consistent across all regions and marketplaces, delivering an uninterrupted and accurate customer experience even during peak holiday seasons.
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What advice do you have for tech leaders adopting distributed databases, and how does YugabyteDB simplify cloud-native transformations?
Maintaining a balance between performance, scalability, and resilience is crucial, especially as AI increases the pressure on these requirements.
Focusing on the fundamentals (performance, scalability, and resilience) is key–if these are neglected, the user experience will be lackluster. YugabyteDB preserves all the core functionalities of PostgreSQL while making it cloud-native, ensuring it’s easy to deploy, resilient, observable, and scalable across multiple regions.
PostgreSQL-compatible YugabyteDB offers cloud-native features, enterprise-grade security, a resilient database, and limitless scalability. Developers and DBAs benefit from working with a familiar API (PostgreSQL or Cassandra) while gaining access to new and powerful cloud-native database features. This reduces complexity, shortens the new technology learning curve, and increases developer agility and operational efficiency.
We also offer value-added tools like YugabyteDB Voyager to simplify and make the transition from traditional legacy systems to cloud-native YugabyteDB environments more efficient. This unified, open-source tool streamlines the end-to-end migration process–covering cluster preparation, schema migration, and live data transfer–while reducing risks, complexity, and operational costs associated with legacy database modernization.
Data consistency and performance are key concerns for tech leaders. How does YugabyteDB tackle these challenges, and when is it the best fit for enterprises?
Major enterprise-grade applications, such as business critical support consumer-facing transactions, require 24×7 availability and zero downtime. YugabyteDB guarantees high resilience, scalability, and strong data consistency without sacrificing performance.
The ability to operate seamlessly in cloud and edge environments makes YugabyteDB the ideal choice for emerging technologies like AI, where real-time processing and data accuracy are key. By adapting configurations to meet specific application needs, YugabyteDB enables organizations to scale efficiently and maintain consistent performance as data needs grow.
Paramount+ relies on YugabyteDB to ensure a seamless user experience, even during peak traffic surges. High-profile live events like Super Bowl 2024, the AFC Championship, and The Grammys place immense demand on every layer of Paramount+’s infrastructure as millions of concurrent users engage simultaneously.
Traditional monolithic databases struggle to scale dynamically or assure zero downtime, making it difficult to handle traffic spikes efficiently. With YugabyteDB, Paramount+ leverages horizontal scaling and multi-region deployment, enabling them to live stream major events without disruption or downtime.
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How does YugabyteDB’s PostgreSQL compatibility help tech leaders modernize databases without disrupting developer workflows?
When we founded YugabyteDB, we assessed the database landscape and predicted that PostgreSQL would become the standard for relational database functionality. We’re happy that our bet paid off almost a decade later. PostgreSQL is now the top database choice for developers who appreciate its active open-source community reliability, cost-effectiveness, advanced features, and extensive ecosystem of tools.
However, PostgreSQL’s limited resilience and scalability can be a stumbling block for enterprises with business-critical applications. This is particularly challenging for apps that must stay online through planned or unplanned outages, scale quickly to meet demand, or keep data in multiple regions.
YugabyteDB leverages PostgreSQL’s strengths but extends its functionality to meet modern enterprises’ enhanced performance, scalability, availability, and security demands.
YugabyteDB combines the trusted PostgreSQL API with an enterprise-grade distributed architecture. By reusing PostgreSQL’s query engine, YugabyteDB ensures compatibility with key features like transactional semantics, retry logic, error codes, and change data capture. Leveraging the PostgreSQL ecosystem natively with YugabyteDB helps significantly boost developer productivity. Available as a managed service, YugabyteDB can be deployed in any public, hybrid, or multi-cloud environment, enabling seamless scalability.
In January 2025, we announced that YugabyteDB 2.25 delivers the most PostgreSQL-compatible distributed database on the market to developers. This release allows users to safely upgrade or downgrade to the major PostgreSQL version most compatible with their data infrastructure. We’re meeting customers wherever they are in their PostgreSQL journey without disrupting their existing workflows.
How can CTOs leverage YugabyteDB’s open source to drive innovation and avoid vendor lock-in?
The viability of open source continues to be a widely debated topic as businesses explore business model changes to operate effectively in the era of cloud architectures. While we’ve seen some companies retreat or abandon open source, we recently reaffirmed our commitment to open source.
This is not just for altruistic reasons or because it’s good for business; we believe open-source projects are critical for advancing important technology developments.
Open source powers the rapid feedback loop necessary for high-velocity, collaborative, community-driven development of feature-rich software while maintaining high quality and reliability. Constant community scrutiny ensures bugs are found and fixed fast, improving security and database resilience.
As an open-source solution, YugabyteDB can rapidly accelerate innovation, giving users more transparency than other database options. YugabyteDB is fully compatible with PostgreSQL. This means an app written to YugabyteDB can move to PostgreSQL with little to no changes.
Many companies claim to be “open source” but lock users into proprietary tools that are virtually impossible to move directly to PostgreSQL (due to a lack of compatibility). YugabyteDB provides seamless data and application portability to and from PostgreSQL without restrictions, penalties, or extensive code changes—offering the flexibility essential in today’s dynamic tech landscape.
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What key trends will shape distributed databases, and how will Yugabyte adapt to meet CDO and CTO needs?
Key trends shaping the database landscape include the adoption of DBaaS and a shift from public cloud to private cloud environments. AI integration brings new opportunities and challenges, requiring automation and performance optimization to manage the growing data load.
Organizations are increasingly turning to DBaaS to streamline operations. This approach improves efficiency across various infrastructures while focusing on private cloud solutions, which helps businesses reduce costs and enhance scalability for their workloads.
YugabyteDB addresses these evolving demands by combining the strengths of relational databases with the scalability of cloud-native architectures. Features like Smart Data Distribution and an Adaptive CBO enhance performance and support many database objects, making it a competitive choice for running various applications.
YugabyteDB allows enterprises to migrate their PostgreSQL applications while maintaining similar performance levels, which is crucial for modern workloads. Yugabyte’s commitment to open-source development encourages community involvement and provides flexibility for customers who want to avoid vendor lock-in.
What key lessons can tech leaders learn about building scalable, resilient, and high-performing systems from your experience with distributed SQL databases?
Ultra-resilience has never been more important. It’s crucial for minimizing risks and preventing outages and also supports successful AI implementation at scale.
Organizations must ensure their underlying data systems are always accurate and available to build a scalable, resilient, high-performing application. This includes preparing systems to handle unexpected traffic peaks.
There are a few key steps organizations should take. First, assess your current systems to identify problems or areas for improvement and to align your technology investments with business goals. Do you need to reduce downtime or improve scalability? By understanding your organization’s needs, you’ll be better prepared to build or update your systems.
Next, plan the architecture adjustments required to address your current challenges and ensure your teams have the knowledge and skills to maintain new systems. Data accuracy is critical in systems of record, as distributed environments face challenges like replication delays and the limitations of eventual consistency. Transitioning from eventual consistency systems to a distributed SQL solution can improve data reliability.
Once the work is completed, it’s important to monitor and make enhancements to continuously optimize performance. Organizations with a resilient, scalable, and high-performance distributed database gain the agility and freedom to innovate without infrastructure limitations.
