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Using cloud Database as a Service (DBaaS) offerings instead of on-premise deployments is increasingly common. Key advantages include improved availability and scalability at a lower cost than on-premise alternatives. In this paper, we describe the design of Taurus, a new multi-tenant cloud database system. Taurus separates the compute and storage layers in a similar manner to Amazon Aurora and Microsoft Socrates and provides similar benefits, such as read replica support, low network utilization, hardware sharing and scalability. However, the Taurus architecture has several unique advantages. Taurus offers novel replication and recovery algorithms providing better availability than existing approaches using the same or fewer replicas. Also, Taurus is highly optimized for performance, using no more than one network hop on critical paths and exclusively using append-only storage, delivering faster writes, reduced device wear, and constant-time snapshots. This paper describes Taurus and provides a detailed description and analysis of the storage node architecture, which has not been previously available from the published literature.