YugabyteDB is an open-source, high-performance distributed SQL database built on a scalable and fault-tolerant design inspired by Google Spanner. YugabyteDB Managed is a fully-managed "YugabyteDB-as-a-Service" that allows users to run clusters on either Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform, offering a free tier with 3 nodes, 5 GB of storage, high availability, and management UI. To get started, users create an account, provision a cluster, download YugabyteDB clients, connect to the cloud-based cluster using administrative credentials, create a sample database, build objects, load data, and connect to the cluster with an administrative tool like DataGrip. With its PostgreSQL wire-compatible SQL API and support for various tools and platforms, YugabyteDB is suitable for developing applications with distributed SQL capabilities.