This document introduces YugaByte DB, a high-performance, distributed, transactional database. It is built to scale horizontally on commodity servers across data centers for mission-critical applications. YugaByte DB uses a transactional document store based on RocksDB, Raft-based replication for resilience, and automatic sharding and rebalancing. It supports ACID transactions across documents, provides APIs compatible with Cassandra and Redis, and is open source. The architecture is designed for high performance, strong consistency, and cloud-native deployment.