Dev Propulsion Labs Sam Lambert of PlanetScale on surviving AWS outages and the real cost of extreme fault tolerance
Oct 28, 2025
Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale and expert in distributed databases, shares insights on surviving major AWS outages with extreme fault tolerance. He discusses the explosive growth of Vitess, emphasizing that operational excellence is more vital than flashy marketing. Sam also highlights the importance of community and events, along with how successful DevTools founders leverage product intuition and branding. Plus, he reveals the real costs of building reliable databases and advises against premature scaling while celebrating PlanetScale's rapid evolution.
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Staying Up During A Major AWS Outage
- Sam Lambert describes being paged at midnight during a major AWS US East outage and watching PlanetScale remain fine.
- He credits the outcome to their dedication to extreme fault tolerance rather than running on bare metal outside the cloud.
Tier Zero Means Constant Operational Maturity
- PlanetScale treats itself as a "tier zero" database serving mission-critical customers that cannot tolerate downtime.
- Continuous operational maturity and replacement at scale form their lasting competitive moat.
Pick Managed DBs To Avoid DIY Ops Pain
- Do choose PlanetScale if you want high availability and performance without DIY configuration.
- Try their Postgres product if you're a startup seeking an easy-entry, well-operated hosted database.