As enterprises accelerate their adoption of AI-powered applications and cloud-native architectures, the need for databases that can handle distributed workloads with consistency and resilience has never been more critical. At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 in Atlanta this November, YugabyteDB will demonstrate how distributed PostgreSQL is evolving to meet the demands of the AI era, offering attendees insights into building scalable, mission-critical applications that leverage vector search, RAG capabilities, and agentic AI.
In this exclusive VMblog pre-show interview, Ajay Khanna, Chief Marketing Officer at YugabyteDB, discusses the company’s plans for the event, including their flagship Distributed SQL Summit (DSS 2025) on November 10th and their presence at booth #1030 throughout the conference. Khanna explains how YugabyteDB’s PostgreSQL-compatible distributed database addresses the unique challenges of GenAI workloads while maintaining ACID compliance, ultra-resilience, and seamless scalability across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Read on to discover what makes YugabyteDB’s approach to distributed SQL distinctive and why this year’s summit promises hands-on labs, expert sessions from leading enterprises, and insights into how AI is reshaping data management for developers and DBAs alike.
VMblog: Can you give us your elevator pitch? What key message will attendees hear from you at KubeCon NA 2025, and what actionable insights will they take back to influence their management teams?
Ajay Khanna: YugabyteDB is an AI-ready, cloud-native distributed PostgreSQL-compatible database that combines strong consistency with ultra-resilience, seamless scalability, and geo-distribution to deliver business-critical, transactional applications.
Available as a flexible service in any public, private, or hybrid cloud, YugabyteDB provides the distributed PostgreSQL foundation modern transactional applications need – combining absolute data correctness with effortless scalability and high availability.
Postgres is emerging to be the most popular database for AI professionals. At KubeCon, we will showcase how Distributed PostgreSQL is evolving for the AI era. We are also hosting our annual Distributed SQL Summit (DSS 2025), a co-located event on Nov. 10 that will feature sessions from leading enterprises and hyperscalers about AI use cases and best practices.
VMblog: Where can attendees find you at the event? What hands-on demos, interactive experiences, or booth activities have you designed to showcase your technology?
Khanna: Attendees should join us on Nov. 10 for the Distributed SQL Summit at Omni Atlanta Hotel at Centennial Park, Atrium Terrace. The event runs from 10:00 am to 5:30 pm EST, followed by an evening of entertainment. You can register for this co-located event during your KubeCon registration or register here. There will be a happy hour and a lot of fun activities, including raffle giveaways, for attendees to enjoy.
After DSS, attendees can find Yugabyte at booth #1030 KubeCon on Nov. 11-13.
VMblog: Can you dive deeper into your company’s core technologies? What specific challenges do you solve for KubeCon attendees in their day-to-day operations?
Khanna: YugabyteDB is the AI-ready, multi-modal, distributed SQL database for building global, cloud-native applications. It combines strong ACID consistency with ultra-resilience, scalability and flexible geo-distribution that’s ideal for cloud-native, business-critical applications.
Available as a flexible service in any public, private, or hybrid cloud, open source YugabyteDB is used by customers of all sizes who love the familiarity of PostgreSQL, but need built-in resilience, on-demand scale, and simplified operations. While other databases force tradeoffs that increase costs and complexity, YugabyteDB offers a powerful, multi-API database that supports the easy lift-and-shift of legacy and container-based applications.
VMblog: In an increasingly saturated cloud-native marketplace, what distinguishes your solution in late 2025? What’s your unique value proposition?
Khanna: Yugabyte is the only AI-ready, multi-modal distributed database that is fully PostgreSQL compatible. It delivers ultra-resilience, global scalability, and consistent reliability so your most critical applications are always-on, perform anywhere, and scale effortlessly.
It ensures zero downtime, global reach, and enterprise-grade performance whether deployed in the cloud, on-prem, or hybrid environments. YugabyteDB empowers developers to build RAG applications on the database of their choice. Specifically, YugabyteDB offers users:
- Ultra Resilience: Built-in fault tolerance and continuous availability for business-critical applications. Perform rolling upgrades with zero impact and ensure no downtime, even during failures or maintenance.
- Globally Scalability: Seamlessly scale horizontally with automatic sharding and global data distribution-keeping data close to users while maintaining performance and consistency across regions.
- Reliability: Maintain strict ACID compliance, ensure predictable performance and cost control, and deploy flexibly across public, private, or hybrid clouds with a trusted DBaaS experience.
VMblog: With GenAI workloads and LLM deployments reshaping cloud-native architectures, how does your solution address these AI infrastructure demands?
Khanna: YugabyteDB unites the power of the pgvector PostgreSQL extension with an inherently distributed architecture. Tested for 1 billion vectors, this future-proofed foundation helps users build AI-powered, data-driven applications, including RAG and agentic AI, that demand high-performance vector search.
Our unique approach to vector indexing addresses the limitations of single-node PostgreSQL systems when dealing with large-scale vector datasets. YugabyteDB’s extensible indexing framework supports the seamless integration of state-of-the-art vector indexing libraries and algorithms, ensuring that your apps can quickly capitalize on new advancements and optimizations.
The future-ready design supports evolving vector indexing libraries and algorithms, providing flexibility and customization for new libraries. With YugabyteDB, enterprises can run scalable, resilient, and feature-rich vector searches, with the power and familiarity of PostgreSQL.
YugabyteDB MCP Server provides seamless AI-powered experiences in applications. In addition, YugabyteDB integrates with cutting-edge AI ecosystem companies (OpenAI, LangChain, LlamaIndex, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Unstructured, and many more) and utilizes new AI technologies, continuously adding new integrations, adoption guides, tutorials, and best practices to our developer offerings.
VMblog: Is your company presenting any sessions, workshops, or contributing to the event programming? What key takeaways will attendees gain from your presentations?
Khanna: Yes, on Nov. 10, we are hosting our 7th annual Distributed SQL Summit (DSS) co-located with Kubecon at Omni Atlanta Hotel at Centennial Park, Atrium Terrace.
The full-day event starts at 10:00 AM and ends at 5:30 PM EST with an epic happy hour. DSS 2025 will feature:
🔥 An all-star speaker lineup for 10 sessions
💻 Hands-on labs and live demos
👕 Live t-shirt printing (yes, customized on the spot!)
🤖 Exciting raffles – including 10 robot giveaways
🍕 Seriously good food
🍻 A legendary happy hour to wrap up the day
This annual in-person event brings together developers, architects, and technologists to discuss data-driven mission-critical applications and AI-related advancements, ideas, and best practices. As AI impacts architectural choices across the enterprise, this year’s summit will be invaluable, allowing participants to dive into the challenges and opportunities AI presents.
Register here.
VMblog: How does your technology fit within the broader CNCF ecosystem? What’s your role in the modern cloud-native infrastructure stack?
Khanna: YugabyteDB complements the CNCF ecosystem by providing the data layer modern microservices and AI-driven applications need. It integrates seamlessly with Kubernetes, observability, and CI/CD tools in the CNCF stack-delivering resilient, horizontally scalable, and globally distributed data services. In the modern cloud-native infrastructure, YugabyteDB is the transactional backbone, ensuring data consistency, availability, and performance across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
VMblog: What emerging technologies or industry shifts is your company monitoring most closely as we head into 2026?
Khanna: As witnessed across the globe, we are closely tracking how AI technologies develop, how new standards emerge, and how it is used in mission-critical business processes. YugabyteDB is designed to build highly scalable next-generation AI RAG applications. It is also powered by AI to help with migration from legacy databases to distributed SQL and offers AI agents for performance tuning and anomaly detection. In addition, we are also monitoring how intercloud data management evolves as enterprises adopt multi-cloud strategies for superior business continuity as well as better cost optimization.
VMblog: How is AI reshaping the way developers, DBAs, and organizations interact with and manage their data?
Khanna: AI is redefining the roles performed by developers and DBAs by providing them with new toolsets to become more efficient and enhance the user experience. Tasks like query optimization, performance tuning, and anomaly detection are increasingly automated, freeing teams to focus on innovation.
MCP servers offer an easy way to interact with databases and time-consuming and resource-intensive processes like database migrations can now be done by providing simple prompts in natural language. Developers can leverage AI to build data-aware and adaptive applications, while organizations gain real-time intelligence and faster decision-making from their operational data.
