The Real Failure Rate of EBS

This post quantifies the real-world failure rate of Amazon EBS volumes, demonstrating that performance degradation is frequent and can lead to application downtime. It provides a statistical analysis of expected failure events and their compounding effect in distributed systems. The post details PlanetScale's mitigation strategies, including direct EBS monitoring and zero-downtime reparenting, and highlights how these challenges informed the development of PlanetScale Metal, which uses local storage to avoid network-attached storage issues.