# Cyoda Documentation

Build and run Cyoda applications — from local cyoda-go to hosted Cyoda Cloud.

![Illustration of interconnected entity lifecycle components — state, workflows, events, and audit — unified in a single Cyoda runtime.](heroImage)

  <Badge variant="teal" size="sm">EDBMS — Entity Database Management System</Badge>

  # One transactional runtime for the entity lifecycle.

  Cyoda is an EDBMS: state machine, processors, and full revision history
  live inside the record, committed atomically — minimizing the need for
  sagas. A simpler stack than Postgres + Temporal + Kafka + a CDC audit
  pipeline. Build complete event-driven backends on one runtime. Open
  source, single Go binary, Postgres-backed.

  <Button href="/getting-started/install-and-first-entity/" variant="primary">Get started</Button>
  <Button href="/concepts/what-is-cyoda/" variant="secondary">Learn the concepts</Button>

## Four storage engines. One application contract.

Three open-source engines ship with cyoda-go — in-memory, SQLite, and
PostgreSQL — each tuned to a different operational shape. A commercial
Cassandra plugin extends the same application code to fully scalable,
robust production workloads.

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## Where to go next

- **New here?** Start with the [install-and-first-entity onramp](/getting-started/install-and-first-entity/).
- **Understanding Cyoda?** Read [Concepts](/concepts/what-is-cyoda/).
- **Building an app?** [Build](/build/) covers tier-agnostic patterns.
- **Running one?** [Run](/run/) covers [desktop](/run/desktop/), [Docker](/run/docker/), [Kubernetes](/run/kubernetes/), and [Cyoda Cloud](/run/cyoda-cloud/).
- **Need API specs?** [Reference](/reference/) embeds and ingests from [cyoda-go](https://github.com/Cyoda-platform/cyoda-go).