# Compute / storage separation

**Source:** https://promtable.com/glossary/compute-storage-separation

> Compute / storage separation is the cloud-database architecture where compute (queries) and storage (data) scale independently — letting compute scale to zero while storage stays durable. Neon, Aurora Serverless, Snowflake, BigQuery pioneered this in 2026.

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Compute / storage separation is the cloud-database architecture where compute (queries) and storage (data) scale independently — letting compute scale to zero while storage stays durable. Neon, Aurora Serverless, Snowflake, BigQuery pioneered this in 2026.

Traditional databases bundle compute + storage on the same machine; scaling means resizing both. Separation flips this: storage lives in a durable shared layer (S3 / EFS / proprietary), compute is ephemeral and stateless, multiple compute instances can read the same storage, compute can scale to zero while data persists. The unlocks: cheap idle databases (Neon scale-to-zero), per-query elastic compute (Snowflake warehouses), read replicas without storage duplication, instant database branching ([[database-branching]] uses storage CoW). Trade-offs: compute cold-start when scaling from zero (typically 100ms-3s in 2026), network latency between compute and storage requires careful caching. The architecture behind most modern serverless databases.

## When to use

- Spiky workloads (dev DBs, batch analytics).
- Apps that need cheap idle states.

## Common mistakes

- Latency-critical apps may hit cold-start delays — pre-warm or pin compute.

## Related terms

- [serverless-database](https://promtable.com/glossary/serverless-database)
- [database-branching](https://promtable.com/glossary/database-branching)
- [cold-start](https://promtable.com/glossary/cold-start)

*Last updated: 2026-06-01*
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Original page: https://promtable.com/glossary/compute-storage-separation
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