PlanetScale Exposes the Real Failure Rate of EBS: It's Not Binary, It's Constant Degradation

2025-03-18
PlanetScale Exposes the Real Failure Rate of EBS: It's Not Binary, It's Constant Degradation

Based on its massive use of Amazon EBS, PlanetScale reveals the true failure rate is far higher than AWS documentation suggests. The article highlights that EBS 'slowness' is far more common than outright failure, with frequent performance fluctuations even when meeting AWS's performance guarantees, causing application outages. This degradation isn't random; it's inherent to the system's complexity. PlanetScale mitigates issues through monitoring and automated EBS volume replacement, ultimately leading to PlanetScale Metal to avoid network storage performance issues.