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Architecture & Storage Savings

Deep dive into how KOLMOS delivers 80-90% storage cost reduction.

Last Updated: August 2026

The Problem with Traditional Database Storage

Traditional databases like MongoDB (WiredTiger BSON) and PostgreSQL store data row-by-row on expensive provisioned SSDs (AWS EBS gp3 costing $0.08–$0.25/GB/month + IOPS). As tables grow into terabytes, storage costs explode, and deleted rows create physical bloat.

How KOLMOS Reduces Storage Costs by 80-90%

KOLMOS decouples the **Wire Protocol Interface** from the **Storage Execution Core**: - **Columnar Compression:** Data is packed into columnar chunks using ZSTD and Snappy dictionary encoding, yielding a **3x to 5x physical compression ratio**. - **Cold Storage Offloading:** Historical data segments are automatically offloaded to Cloudflare R2 or AWS S3 ($0.015/GB/month with zero egress fees on R2). - **Auto-Vacuuming:** Deleted rows and tombstones are physically compacted during background segment merges, completely eliminating table bloat.

KOLMOS Multi-Protocol Architecture

All three protocols map directly to the same underlying DataFusion Arrow/Parquet storage layer:

textKOLMOS Reference
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                        Client Applications                        |
|   Mongoose / Prisma / DBeaver / mongosh / psql / mysql / PyMongo  |
+-------------------+-----------------+-----------------------------+
                    |                 |
     MongoDB Wire   |   MySQL Wire    |   Postgres Wire
     (Port 27017)   |   (Port 3306)   |   (Port 5432)
                    v                 v
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|               KOLMOS Unified Wire & Query Gateway                 |
|       SCRAM / Native Auth | BSON & SQL Tokenizers | DML Hooks     |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
                                  |
                                  v
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                     Apache DataFusion Engine                      |
|       Columnar Execution | Vectorized Scans | Query Planner       |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
                                  |
                                  v
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|               KOLMOS Columnar Storage & Cold Tier                 |
|    Local Parquet Segments  <--->  Cloudflare R2 / AWS S3 Objects    |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+