YDB can be either self-deployed to computer clusters across physical hosts or on virtual machines via Kubernetes or as a managed service in Yandex Cloud.

The system is based on tablets which implement a communication protocol for solving consensus in a network of unreliable processors.

Unlike Calvin, YDB supports interactive and non-deterministic transactions by using record locking.

Actors are single-threaded back-end automats that exchange messages with each other while residing on different cluster servers.

A number of digital services, such as virtual block devices or persistent queues, have been developed as a layer over YDB.

In April 2022, the YDB DBMS was published on GitHub as free software under the Apache 2.0 License.