Yugabyte has added multiregion Kubernetes support along with other features in the latest update to its open source distributed SQL database YugabyteDB 2.18.

The update, which is already in general availability, adds multiregion Kubernetes support to the company’s self-managed, database-as-a-service YugabyteDB Anywhere.

To help enterprises eliminate points of friction while deploying Kubernetes, the company has added support for shared namespaces, incremental backups, and up to five times faster backups, Yugabyte said.

“Multiregion, multicluster Kubernetes deployments are made simpler through the combination of YugabyteDB’s native synchronous replication and Kubernetes Multicluster Service (MCS) APIs,” Yugabyte said.

Enterprises who need a standard two-datacenter configuration can configure and leverage the power of xCluster asynchronous replication for Kubernetes, Yugabyte said, adding that it is also adding support for Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE) to provide more variety of orchestration platforms.

The update also includes an intelligent performance advisor for YugabyteDB Anywhere, which optimizes indexes, queries, and schema. Other updates to the self-managed, database-as-a-service include security features and granular recovery with the point-in-time recovery feature.

The YugabyteDB 2.18 update also comes with the general availability of collocated tables, new query pushdowns, and scheduled full compactions that improve performance on diverse workloads, the company said.

YugabyteDB supports “collocating” SQL tables, which allow for closely related data in ‘colocated’ tables to reside together in a single parent tablet called the “colocation tablet,” according to the company.

“Colocation helps to optimize for low-latency, high-performance data access by reducing the need for additional trips across the network. It also reduces the overhead of creating a tablet for every relation (tables, indexes, and so on) and the storage for these per node,” the company added in a blog post.

Scheduled full compactions, according to Yugabyte, improve the performance of data access and minimize space amplification.

In March, the company added a new managed command line interface and other features to YugabyteDB Managed.

In its last update which was made generally available in June last year, the company added a new migration service dubbed Voyager.

In May last year, the company launched Yugabyte 2.13, which included new features such as materialized views, local reads for performance, and region-local backups.