The next-generation database developer and the cloud services giant will collaborate more closely to work with joint customers looking to upgrade mission-critical applications on the AWS platform and migrate away from legacy databases in favor of YugabyteDB.
Next-generation database provider Yugabyte has struck a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services through which the two companies will accelerate their joint go-to-market efforts and technical collaboration.
Under the SCA, Yugabyte and AWS will focus on helping customers modernize their mission-critical applications for the cloud and migrate database workloads off legacy database systems.
The expanded collaboration will help customers more efficiently deploy and operate “ultra-resilient cloud-native applications” running on the YugabyteDB database on AWS, according to the Yugabyte announcement.
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“People are embracing digital, cloud-native architectures,” said Karthik Ranganathan, Yugabyte co-founder and co-CEO, in an interview with CRN, pointing to the growing adoption of public, private and multi-cloud systems. “And that is driving the need for more resilient and scalable systems,” especially at the data layer, he said.
More generally, Ranganathan (pictured) said, businesses and organizations are modernizing their IT estates to meet the demands of AI applications and agents, edge computing and event-driven systems. And he noted the growing popularity of the PostgreSQL database, which is the foundation for the company’s flagship YugabyteDB.
In November Yugabyte released the results of a survey of CIOs, CTOs and other technology managers, prepared in collaboration with Gatepoint Research, that found a growing focus on developing next-generation applications—including AI software—and application modernization.
That survey also identified legacy databases, with their slow rates of innovation, limited scalability and resiliency issues, as a significant roadblock to such modernization efforts.
“Our customer base already has a lot of very mission-critical use cases [applications] that are running, and they need to take it to the next level,” Ranganathan said. “We call this app modernization. They’re already, perhaps, on the cloud, but they need the scale, the resilience, the availability to go multi-cloud.”
And because many of those applications are running on legacy databases, businesses want their database “to go where the app goes, which is to any of the public clouds or private cloud, and be able to run in that fashion and support it. So it also becomes a database modernization thing,” the CEO said.
Yugabyte, founded in 2017 and based in Sunnyvale, Calif., has long worked with AWS and offered YugabyteDB on the AWS platform. Customers using the Yugabyte database on AWS include a major global bank, a leading risk intelligence platform, a leading cybersecurity company managing more than 1 petabyte of globally replicated data, and a major gaming company.
YugabyteDB Aeon, the company’s fully managed Database as a Service, debuted on AWS in 2021. The company also sells its software through the AWS Marketplace.
“We’re seeing some really big customers with really critical workloads and a lot of demand,” Ranganathan said. “We have some pretty critical workloads, at the highest degree, running on Yugabyte on AWS. So that combo naturally deepened the relationship.”
SCA Provisions
Under the SCA, the two companies will target customers’ database modernization and cloud migration initiatives that involve legacy database workloads running on AWS. Yugabyte will support customers building globally distributed, mission- critical-transactional applications on the AWS platform.
“Customers want to modernize their databases without adding operational complexity,” said Allison Johnson, director of Americas technology partnerships at AWS, in a statement. “Through this collaboration with Yugabyte, we’re enabling customers to transform legacy systems while maintaining the reliability and simplicity their teams need to focus on innovation, whether that’s accelerating AI adoption or building next-generation applications.”
“AWS is modern cloud-native infrastructure. Yugabyte helps unlock the power of data on top of [that] cloud-native infrastructure for transactional applications,” Ranganathan said. The SCA will “accelerate” the two companies’ go-to-market efforts and “deepen” their technical collaboration, he said.
The SCA also signals to customers and prospects that the two companies are acting in concert “to really unlock value” and that there will be no gaps in providing support on a global basis.
The SCA also includes joint sales and support “field execution” motions through the AWS Partner Network Customer Engagement pipeline. Ranganathan said that provides a framework for how the two companies will work to sell to and support customers across global regions.
Yugabyte works with a range of channel partners, including systems integrators that implement the Yugabyte technology and ISVs that develop cloud applications that run on the database. “They’re very critical,” Ranganathan said, noting that many Yugabyte-AWS deals often involve a channel partner—what the CEO called “a network effect”—and partners will benefit from the closer Yugabyte-AWS cooperation.
