New Product Names: YugabyteDB Managed and YugabyteDB Anywhere

Today, we are announcing new names for our product offerings that were previously referred to as Yugabyte Platform and Yugabyte Cloud. The features and capabilities of these products aren’t changing. However, we hope the new names better capture their underlying features and benefits.

We realized that our previous product names did not properly communicate our vision for the product nor easily identify what our products do. But don’t worry, both YugabyteDB and our company name, Yugabyte, are staying the same—and if you haven’t heard the explanation of what our company name means, then read through to the end where I retell that story.

Introducing YugabyteDB Managed and YugabyteDB Anywhere

We are excited to introduce you to our new product names: YugabyteDB Managed and YugabyteDB Anywhere. The below table summarizes the old name, the new name that you will see moving forward, and the key capabilities of each offering.

So, why did we go through this change? For the sake of transparency as a true open source company, here were our primary motivating factors:

• We feel the “Platform” term is a bit overused. What is a platform? It’s a great marketing word that sounds cool and when indicating a comprehensive solution makes sense. However, in the end, it’s a term that seems to mean something different to everyone.
• Our previous products used just “Yugabyte” in the name. Yugabyte is our company, and YugabyteDB is the product. Our new naming is based on YugabyteDB and signifies a direct relationship to that core, open source product.
• The “cloud” term might not be as fluffy as platform in the marketing world. But, again, it conveys different things to different people. Even within Yugabyte, we talk about private cloud, hybrid cloud, public cloud, cloud computing, rain clouds, and more. As a result, it’s not obvious which one we meant when talking about Yugabyte Cloud.

As a result of these three reasons, we are thrilled to move forward with YugabyteDB Managed and YugabyteDB Anywhere. Below are quick descriptions of those two products to make sure we’re all on the same page.

YugabyteDB Managed: Fully-managed distributed SQL database

YugabyteDB Managed is the new name for what was previously referred to as Yugabyte Cloud. As the new name implies clearly, YugabyteDB Managed is our fully-managed DBaaS offering of YugabyteDB. With this offering, Yugabyte takes care of the day-to-day operations. In most of these environments the data sits in our VPCs (if interested in a different model of where the data lives, reach out and let’s discuss options).

YugabyteDB Managed is the fastest path to get started. You can create a free account in just a few minutes and start using and testing YugabyteDB in no time. Along with access to a fully-managed instance of YugabyteDB in your choice of public clouds (AWS and GCP today), we provide extensive and easy-to-follow training and hands-on-guides to get started.

YugabyteDB Anywhere: Deploy a self-managed DBaaS anywhere

YugabyteDB Anywhere replaces what was previously referred to as Yugabyte Platform. We recognize that “platform” is a term that implies different things to everyone. YugabyteDB Anywhere is a unique offering among distributed SQL products. It is more than just a single pane of glass for managing database clusters in different environments. YugabyteDB Anywhere includes a REST API server, an orchestration service, monitoring and analytics, a UI, and the open source database YugabyteDB.

Together, those tools make it easy to deploy YugabyteDB in any environment, from on-premises to your choice of clouds. You can then maintain control of that environment while simplifying the management and operational tasks through the built-in automation. The data doesn’t leave your datacenter or VPC.

What is a “yugabyte?”

As promised earlier, if you aren’t sure where our name came from or are trying to look up “yugabyte” in the dictionary (do people actually do that anymore?), then here is the background on our name.

The word “yugabyte” is a play on words and a unique name our founders created. The beginning comes from the Sanskrit word “yuga,” meaning an era or extremely long period of time. And while the full word “yugabyte” is not an official measurement of data size like petabyte, exabyte, and zettabyte, the ending of “byte” does give a nod to the quantity of data that continues to be generated.

So when we combine those two parts—”yuga” and “byte”—the word signifies data that lives forever without limits. As the importance of data continues to grow, we believe it’s not just the quantity of data created that matters but our ability to reliably store that data anywhere and access it anytime.

And with that, Yugabyte was born, and, according to our name, will be around for eons—unlike our original product names!

If you haven’t already, check out YugabyteDB Docs to learn more about YugabyteDB Managed and YugabyteDB Anywhere.