# Cluster Architecture (Cloud-Native Postgres) Traditional monolithic PostgreSQL databases tightly couple the **Compute** engine (parsing SQL, executing queries) and the **Storage** engine (writing pages to disk, managing the Write-Ahead Log). The defining innovation of modern, horizontally scalable Postgres architectures is the **decoupling of Compute and Storage**. ![[arch_cluster_overview.png|256]] By separating these concerns over a high-speed network, cloud providers route write operations directly to a distributed, fault-tolerant storage layer. This eliminates traditional bottlenecks like full-page writes and checkpoints, while allowing the compute nodes to remain stateless and scale "serverless-ly." Various implementations exist, each optimizing for different workloads: - [[Aurora]]: Amazon's log-structured storage, eliminating traditional checkpoints. - [[AlloyDB]]: Google's intelligent, ML-driven caching for hybrid transactional/analytical processing (HTAP). - [[Neon]]: A true serverless architecture offering scale-to-zero compute and Git-like database branching.