Disaggregation: A New Architecture for Cloud Databases

Disaggregation—the separation of database components into independently managed and scalable services—has emerged as a foundational architecture for cloud-native databases. It enables key benefits such as elasticity, resource pooling, and cost efficiency. This paper offers a perspective on the disaggregation trend, tracing its evolution, and presents a set of research efforts that redesign and optimize distributed databases in this new architecture. Finally, the paper outlines future directions and open challenges, highlighting disaggregation as a rich and still largely unexplored area for database research.