Yugabyte Cloud FAQ

Yugabyte Cloud

What is Yugabyte Cloud?

Yugabyte Cloud is a fully managed YugabyteDB-as-a-Service that allows you to run YugabyteDB clusters on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure (coming soon).

You access your Yugabyte Cloud clusters via YSQL and YCQL client APIs, and administer your clusters using Yugabyte Cloud.

See also Yugabyte Cloud at yugabyte.com.

Yugabyte Cloud runs on top of Yugabyte Platform.

How is Yugabyte Cloud priced?

Yugabyte bills for its services as follows:

• Charges by the minute for your Yugabyte Cloud clusters.
• Tabulates costs daily.
• Displays your current monthly costs under Invoices on the Billing tab.

For information on Yugabyte Cloud pricing, refer to the Yugabyte Cloud Standard Price List. For a description of how cluster configurations are costed, refer to Cluster costs.

What regions in AWS and GCP are available?

Refer to Cloud provider regions for a list currently supported regions.

Yugabyte Cloud supports all the regions that have robust infrastructure and sufficient demand from customers. We are continuously improving region coverage, so if there are any regions you would like us to support, reach out to Yugabyte Support.

Clusters

What are the differences between free and standard clusters?

Use the free cluster to get started with YugabyteDB. The free cluster is limited to a single node and 10GB of storage. Although not suitable for production workloads, the cluster includes enough resources to start exploring the core features available for developing applications with YugabyteDB. Free clusters are provisioned with an edge release. You can only have one free cluster. Free clusters that are inactive for 21 days are paused; after 30 days they are deleted.

Standard clusters can have unlimited nodes and storage and are suitable for production workloads. They also support horizontal and vertical scaling - nodes and storage can be added or removed to suit your production loads. Standard clusters also support VPC peering, and scheduled and manual backups. By default, standard clusters are provisioned using a stable release.

A Yugabyte Cloud account is limited to a single free cluster; you can add as many standard clusters as you need.

What can I do if I run out of resources on my free cluster?

If you want to continue testing YugabyteDB with more resource-intensive scenarios, you can:

• Download and run YugabyteDB on a local machine. For instructions, refer to Quick Start.
• Upgrade to a standard cluster to access bigger clusters with more resources.

Can I migrate my free cluster to a standard cluster?

Currently self-service migration is not supported. Contact Yugabyte Support for help with migration.

What is the upgrade policy for clusters?

Upgrades are automatically handled by Yugabyte. There are two types of upgrades:

Yugabyte Cloud

During a maintenance window, Yugabyte Cloud may be in read-only mode and not allow any edit changes. The upgrade has no impact on running clusters. We'll notify you in advance of the maintenance schedule.

Cluster (YugabyteDB) version upgrade

To keep up with the latest bug fixes, improvements, and security fixes, Yugabyte will upgrade your cluster to the latest version.

Yugabyte will notify you in advance of any upcoming upgrade via email. The email includes the date and time of the upgrade window. An Upcoming Upgrade badge is also displayed on the cluster. You can start the upgrade any time by signing in to Yugabyte Cloud, selecting the cluster, clicking the Upcoming Upgrade badge, and clicking Upgrade Now. To change the upgrade window, contact Yugabyte Support.

The database is upgraded to the latest release in the release track that was selected when the cluster was created (either edge or stable). Free clusters are always in the edge track.

Database upgrades of high-availability (multi-node) clusters are done on a rolling basis to avoid any downtime.

YugabyteDB

What version of YugabyteDB does my cluster run on?

Free clusters are provisioned with an edge release, most often from the YugabyteDB latest release series; it may also be a recent stable release.

By default, new standard clusters are provisioned with a stable release, from the YugabyteDB stable release series.

Once a cluster is created, it is upgraded with releases from the release track that was assigned at creation (that is, either edge or stable).

To view the database version running on a particular cluster, navigate to the Clusters page; the database version is displayed next to the cluster name; hover over the version to see the release track.

Can I test YugabyteDB locally?

To test locally, download and install YugabyteDB on a local machine. Refer to Quick Start. For accurate comparison with cloud, be sure to download the version that is running on Yugabyte Cloud.

Support

Is support included in the base price?

Enterprise Support is included in the base price for standard clusters. Refer to the Yugabyte Cloud Support Services Terms and Conditions.

Free and standard cluster customers can also use the YugabyteDB Slack community.

Where can I find the support policy and Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Yugabyte Cloud?

The Yugabyte Cloud SLA, terms of service, acceptable use policy, and more can be found on the Yugabyte Legal page.

How do I check the status of Yugabyte Cloud?

The Yugabyte Cloud Status page displays the current uptime status of Yugabyte Cloud and the Yugabyte Support Portal.

The status page also provides notices of scheduled maintenance and current and past incidents.

Subscribe to the status page by clicking Subscribe to Updates. Email notifications are sent when incidents are created, updated, and resolved.

Security

How secure is my cluster?

Your data is processed at the Yugabyte Cloud account level, and each cloud account is a single tenant, meaning it runs its components for only one customer. Clusters in your cloud are isolated from each other in a separate VPC, and access is limited to the IP addresses you specify in allow lists assigned to each cluster. Resources are not shared between clusters.

Yugabyte Cloud uses both encryption in transit and encryption at rest to protect clusters and cloud infrastructure. Yugabyte Cloud also provides DDoS and application layer protection, and automatically blocks network protocol and volumetric DDoS attacks.

Yugabyte Cloud uses a shared responsibility model for cloud security. For more information on Yugabyte Cloud security, refer to Security architecture.

Cluster configuration and management

What cluster configurations can I create?

Using Yugabyte Cloud, you can create single region clusters that can be deployed across multiple and single availability zones.

The Fault Tolerance of a cluster determines how resilient the cluster is to node and cloud zone failures and, by extension, the cluster configuration. You can configure clusters with the following fault tolerances in Yugabyte Cloud:

• None - single node, with no replication or resiliency. Recommended for development and testing only.
• Node Level - a minimum of 3 nodes deployed in a single availability zone with a replication factor (RF) of 3. YugabyteDB can continue to do reads and writes even in case of a node failure, but this configuration is not resilient to cloud availability zone outages. For horizontal scaling, you can scale nodes in increments of 1.
• Availability Zone Level - a minimum of 3 nodes spread across multiple availability zones with a RF of 3. YugabyteDB can continue to do reads and writes even in case of a cloud availability zone failure. This configuration provides the maximum protection for a data center failure. Recommended for production deployments. For horizontal scaling, nodes are scaled in increments of 3.

Free clusters are limited to a single node in a single region.

For multi-region deployments, including synchronous replication, asynchronous replication, and geo-level partitioning, contact Yugabyte Support.

How do I connect to my cluster?

You can connect to clusters in the following ways:

Cloud Shell

Run the ysqlsh or ycqlsh shell from your browser to connect to and interact with your YugabyteDB database. Cloud Shell does not require a CA certificate or any special network access configured.

Client Shell

Connect to your YugabyteDB cluster using the YugabyteDB ysqlsh and ycqlsh client shells installed on your computer.

Before you can connect using a client shell, you need to add your computer to the cluster IP allow list. Refer to Assign IP Allow Lists.

You must be running the latest versions of the client shells (Yugabyte Client 2.6 or later), which you can download using the following command on Linux or macOS:

$ curl -sSL https://downloads.yugabyte.com/get_clients.sh | bash
copy

Windows client shells require Docker:

docker run -it yugabytedb/yugabyte-client ysqlsh -h <hostname> -p <port>
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psql

Because YugabyteDB is PostgreSQL-compatible, you can use psql to connect to your clusters. The connection string to use is similar to what you would use for ysqlsh, as follows:

psql --host=<HOST_ADDRESS> --port=5433 --username=<DB USER> \
--dbname=yugabyte \
--set=sslmode=verify-full \
--set=sslrootcert=<ROOT_CERT_PATH>
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For detailed steps for configuring other popular third party tools, see Third party tools.

Applications

Applications connect to and interact with YugabyteDB using API client libraries (also known as client drivers). Before you can connect an application, you need to install the correct driver. Clusters have SSL (encryption in-transit) enabled so make sure your driver details include SSL parameters. For information on available drivers, refer to Build an application.

Before you can connect, your application has to be able to reach your Yugabyte Cloud. To add inbound network access from your application environment to Yugabyte Cloud, add the public IP addresses to the cluster IP access list, or use VPC peering to add private IP addresses.

For more details, refer to Connect to clusters.

Why is my free cluster paused?

Free clusters are paused after 21 days of inactivity.

For more details, refer to Inactive free clusters.

How do I keep my free cluster from being paused or deleted?

Free clusters are paused after 21 days of inactivity. To keep a cluster from being paused, perform an action as described in What qualifies as activity on a cluster?

To keep a paused cluster from being deleted, sign in to Yugabyte Cloud, select the cluster on the Clusters page, and click Resume.

What qualifies as activity on a cluster?

Free clusters are paused after 21 days of inactivity. To keep your cluster from being paused, you (or, where applicable, an application connected to the database) can perform any of the following actions:

• Any SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT, or DELETE database operation.

• Create or delete tables.

• Add or remove IP allow lists.

• If the cluster is already paused, resume the cluster by signing in to Yugabyte Cloud, selecting the cluster on the Clusters page, and clicking Resume.

Backups

How are clusters backed up?

By default, every cluster is backed up automatically every 24 hours, and these automatic backups are retained for 8 days. The first automatic backup is triggered 24 hours after creating a table, and is scheduled every 24 hours thereafter. You can change the default backup intervals by adjusting the backup policy settings.

Yugabyte Cloud runs full backups, not incremental.

Backups are retained in the same region as the cluster.

Backups for AWS clusters are encrypted using AWS S3 server-side encryption. Backups for GCP clusters are encrypted using Google-managed server-side encryption keys.

Currently, Yugabyte Cloud does not support backups of free clusters.

Can I download backups?

Currently, Yugabyte Cloud does not support self-service backup downloads. Contact Yugabyte Support for assistance.