While compute management paradigms have rapidly advanced in recent years due to the widespread adoption of containers, storage options have been left behind in comparison. Conventional SQL databases have tacked on clustering options that help a little bit, but what would it take to build a strongly-consistent database specifically for cloud-native deployments? This talk takes a deep-dive into the design of one such database, CockroachDB, which is being built from the ground up via open source. We will look specifically at how to achieve the easy deployment and management of a scalable, self-healing, strongly-consistent database with techniques such as dynamic sharding and rebalancing, symmetric nodes, lock-free transactions, and more. We will then explore how you can both contribute to it and use it to build scalable, resilient applications that can be deployed to any cloud infrastructure.