Architecture

TiDB Cloud is a fully-managed Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) that brings the flexibility and power of TiDB, an open-source HTAP (Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing) database, to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba Cloud.

TiDB is MySQL-compatible, making it easy to migrate and work with existing applications, while offering seamless scalability to handle everything from small workloads to massive, high-performance clusters. It supports both transactional (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) workloads in one system, simplifying operations and enabling real-time insights.

TiDB Cloud makes it easy to scale your database, handle complex management tasks, and stay focused on developing reliable, high-performing applications.

For AWS, TiDB Cloud provides TiDB Cloud Starter for auto-scaling, cost-efficient workloads, and TiDB Cloud Dedicated for enterprise-grade applications with dedicated resources and advanced capabilities.
For Google Cloud and Azure, TiDB Cloud provides TiDB Cloud Dedicated for enterprise-grade applications with dedicated resources and advanced capabilities.
For Alibaba Cloud, TiDB Cloud provides TiDB Cloud Starter for auto-scaling, cost-efficient workloads and TiDB Cloud Essential for production-ready workloads with provisioned capacity.

TiDB Cloud Starter

TiDB Cloud Starter (formerly Serverless) is a fully managed, multi-tenant TiDB offering. It delivers an instant, autoscaling MySQL-compatible database.

The Starter cluster plan is ideal for those who are getting started with TiDB Cloud. It provides developers and small teams with the following features:

No cost: This plan is completely free, with no credit card required to get started.
Storage: Provides an initial 5 GiB of row-based storage and 5 GiB of columnar storage.
Request Units: Includes 50 million Request Units (RUs) for database operations.

TiDB Cloud Essential

For applications experiencing growing workloads and needing scalability in real time, the Essential cluster plan provides the flexibility and performance to keep pace with your business growth with the following features:

Enhanced capabilities: includes all capabilities of the Starter plan, along with the capacity to handle larger and more complex workloads, as well as advanced security features.
Automatic scaling: automatically adjusts storage and computing resources to efficiently meet changing workload demands.
High availability: built-in fault tolerance and redundancy ensure your applications remain available and resilient, even during infrastructure failures.
Predictable pricing: billed based on storage and Request Capacity Units (RCUs) of the compute resources, offering transparent, usage-based pricing that scales with your needs, so you only pay for what you use without surprises.

TiDB Cloud Essential offers two types of high availability to address varying operational requirements.

By default, clusters utilizing the Zonal High Availability option have all components located within the same availability zone, which results in lower network latency.
For applications that require maximum infrastructure isolation and redundancy, the Regional High Availability option distributes nodes across multiple availability zones.

For more information, see High Availability in TiDB Cloud Starter and Essential.

TiDB Cloud Dedicated

TiDB Cloud Dedicated is designed for mission-critical businesses, offering high availability across multiple availability zones, horizontal scaling, and full HTAP capabilities.

Built on isolated cloud resources such as VPCs, VMs, managed Kubernetes services, and cloud storage, it leverages the infrastructure of major cloud providers. TiDB Cloud Dedicated clusters support the complete TiDB feature set, enabling rapid scaling, reliable backups, deployment within specific VPCs, and geographic-level disaster recovery.

TiDB Cloud Dedicated Architecture

TiDB Cloud console

The TiDB Cloud console is the web-based management interface for TiDB Cloud clusters. It provides tools to manage clusters, import or migrate data, monitor performance metrics, configure backups, set up security controls, and integrate with other cloud services, all from a single, user-friendly platform.

TiDB Cloud CLI (Beta)

The TiDB Cloud CLI, ticloud, allows you to manage TiDB Cloud clusters directly from your terminal with simple commands. You can perform tasks such as:

Creating, deleting, and listing clusters.
Importing data into clusters.
Exporting data from clusters.

For more information, see TiDB Cloud CLI Reference.

TiDB Cloud API (Beta)

The TiDB Cloud API is a REST-based interface that provides programmatic access to manage resources across TiDB Cloud Starter and TiDB Cloud Dedicated. It enables automated and efficient handling of tasks such as managing projects, clusters, backups, restores, data imports, billing, and other resources in TiDB Cloud Data Service.

For more information, see TiDB Cloud API Overview.

Nodes

In TiDB Cloud, each cluster consists of TiDB, TiKV, and TiFlash nodes.

In a TiDB Cloud Dedicated cluster, you can fully manage the number and size of your dedicated TiDB, TiKV, and TiFlash nodes according to your performance requirements. For more information, see Scalability.
In a TiDB Cloud Starter or TiDB Cloud Essential cluster, the number and size of TiDB, TiKV, and TiFlash nodes are automatically managed. This ensures seamless scaling, eliminating the need for users to handle node configuration or management tasks.

TiDB node

A TiDB node is a stateless SQL layer that connects to applications using a MySQL-compatible endpoint. It handles tasks like parsing, optimizing, and creating distributed execution plans for SQL queries.

You can deploy multiple TiDB nodes to scale horizontally and manage higher workloads. These nodes work with load balancers, such as TiProxy or HAProxy, to provide a seamless interface. TiDB nodes do not store data themselves---they forward data requests to TiKV nodes for row-based storage or TiFlash nodes for columnar storage.

TiKV node

A TiKV node is the backbone of data storage in the TiDB architecture, serving as a distributed transactional key-value storage engine that delivers reliability, scalability, and high availability.

Key features:

Region-based data storage
- Data is divided into Regions, each covering a specific Key Range (left-closed, right-open interval: StartKey to EndKey).
- Multiple Regions coexist within each TiKV node to ensure efficient data distribution.
Transactional support
- TiKV nodes provide native distributed transaction support at the key-value level, ensuring Snapshot Isolation as the default isolation level.
- The TiDB node translates SQL execution plans into calls to the TiKV node API, enabling seamless SQL-level transaction support.
High availability
- All data in TiKV nodes is replicated (default: three replicas) for durability.
- TiKV ensures native high availability and supports automatic failover, safeguarding against node failures.
Scalability and reliability
- TiKV nodes are designed to handle expanding datasets while maintaining distributed consistency and fault tolerance.

TiFlash node

A TiFlash node is a specialized type of storage node within the TiDB architecture. Unlike ordinary TiKV nodes, TiFlash is designed for analytical acceleration with a columnar storage model.