# Introduction to TiUP, a Cluster Deployment Tool

__*TiUP function*__

+ TiUP is a cluster operation and administer tool introduced in TiDB 4.0. TiUP allows you to perform daily operation and administer of TiDB, including deployment, startup, shutdown, destruction, elastic scale in and upgrading of TiDB clusters, and management of TiDB cluster parameters.

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Package managers are widely used in the installation management of various system software and application software. The emergence of package management tools greatly simplifies software installation, upgrade and maintenance. For example, almost all Linux that uses RPM uses yum for package management, and Anaconda makes it very easy to manage Python's environment and related packages.

In the early TiDB ecosystem, there was no special package management tool, and users could only manually manage them through the corresponding configuration files and folder names. Third-party monitoring and reporting tools such as Prometheus even required additional special management, which greatly improved the difficulty of operation and administer management.

Starting with TiDB 4.0, TiUP, as a new tool, assumes the role of package manager and manages many components in the TiDB ecosystem, such as TiDB, PD, TiKV, etc. When users want to run any component in the TiDB ecosystem, they only need to execute a single TiUP command, which greatly reduces the management difficulty compared to the previous one.