--- title: Get Started description: TiKV Introduction menu: "5.1": weight: 1 --- **TiKV** is a highly scalable, low latency, and easy to use key-value database that delivers performance less than 10 ms at any scale. TiKV is intended to fill the role of a unified distributed storage layer. TiKV excels at working with **large-scale data** by supporting petabyte-scale deployments spanning trillions of rows. As a graduate project of the [Cloud Native Computing Foundation](https://www.cncf.io/), TiKV is originally created by [PingCAP](https://pingcap.com/en) to complement [TiDB](https://github.com/pingcap/tidb). {{< info >}} The **Ti** in TiKV stands for **titanium**. Titanium has the highest strength-to-density ratio than any other metallic elements and is named after the Titans of Greek mythology. {{< /info >}} ## Architecture A TiKV cluster consists of the following components: - A group of TiKV nodes: store key-value pair data - A group of Placement Driver (PD) nodes: work as the manager of the TiKV cluster TiKV clients let you connect to a TiKV cluster and use raw (simple get/put) API or transaction (with transactional consistency guarantees) API to access and update your data. TiKV clients interact with PD and TiKV through gRPC. {{< figure src="/img/basic-architecture.png" alt="TiKV architecture diagram" caption="Architecture of TiKV" width="70" >}} For more information about the architecture, see [Core concepts and architecture behind TiKV](../../reference/architecture/overview/). ## What's Next [TiKV in 5 Minutes](../tikv-in-5-minutes/) is strongly recommended if you want to try TiKV.