The past decade saw the rise of fully distributed databases. Not just local clustering to enable basic load balancing and provide high availability — with attributes such as rack awareness within a datacenter. Truly distributed systems that could be spanned across the globe, designed to work within public clouds — across availability zones, regions, and, with orchestration technologies, even across multiple cloud providers and on-premises hybrid cloud deployments.
Likewise, this past decade has seen a plethora of new database systems designed specifically for distributed database deployments, and others that had distributed architectural components added to their original designs.