What is Cyoda?

Cyoda is an Entity Database Management System (EDBMS). Unlike a relational database, where the unit is a row in a table, and unlike a document database, where the unit is a JSON blob, Cyoda’s first-class unit is an entity: a typed document that carries a lifecycle state, a complete history of every change, and transactional integrity.

An EDBMS, not a database

Most databases answer one question well: what is the state of the world right now? They leave you to glue in a workflow engine, a message bus, an audit layer, and a schema registry on top.

An EDBMS answers a broader question: how does this thing evolve, under what rules, and how do I ask what it looked like last Tuesday? It folds the workflow engine, the audit trail, the schema registry, and the event contract into the storage model. Everything the entity does — transitions, rule evaluations, processor invocations, revisions — is a first-class, queryable part of the same store.

Out of the box, an entity in Cyoda has:

• a schema discovered from ingested samples, evolving over time, lockable;
• a lifecycle state governed by a workflow;
• transactional transitions that produce durable, addressable revisions;
• a temporal history you can query at any point in the past;
• an audit trail of every rule, transition, and processor that touched it.

Why this shape

Cyoda targets domains where state, rules, and data must evolve together: financial ledgers, order management, regulatory compliance, digital twins. These domains share a property — “the row got updated” is not enough information. You need to know why it changed, under what rules, and what the world looked like before. That information has to be engineered into a normal database as an afterthought; an EDBMS makes it the default.

Two forms today

Cyoda ships in two closely related forms, with the same semantics:

• cyoda-go — an open-source Go implementation, run as a local binary or a small cluster. Backends are In-Memory, SQLite, or PostgreSQL, chosen at start.
• Cyoda Cloud — a managed service backed by the Cassandra-based Cyoda Platform Library. Horizontally scalable, multi-tenant, with enterprise identity, observability, and provisioning.

Applications written against one run against the other without rewriting the domain model.

The growth path

You can start on a laptop in minutes and graduate — on your schedule — to a container, to Kubernetes, or to Cyoda Cloud as scale and operational needs demand. The entity, workflow, and API contracts do not change as you move.

1. 1
   In-Memory
   local dev + AI iteration
2. 2
   SQLite
   embedded durable single node
3. 3
   PostgreSQL
   durable clustered production
4. 4
   Cassandra
   enterprise distributed scale

Where to go next

• Design principles — the mental model in one read.
• Entities and lifecycle — the state machine shape of an entity, including a worked example diagram.
• Digital twins and the growth path — how the same application runs at every tier. (Coming as Concepts fills out.)