EBS Failure Mitigation

PlanetScale details the high failure rate of Amazon EBS volumes, particularly their tendency to degrade in performance rather than fail completely. It highlights that these degradations, while often brief, can cause significant downtime for applications. The post quantifies the expected frequency of these failures and their compounding effect in distributed systems. It also introduces PlanetScale's mitigation strategies, including direct EBS monitoring and zero-downtime reparenting, and positions this as a key driver for PlanetScale Metal.