Sam Lambert of PlanetScale on surviving AWS outages and the real cost of extreme fault tolerance

Sam Lambert of PlanetScale reveals how they stayed up during the AWS outage that took down millions of sites, helped grow Vitess usage 61,000% in four years, and why "tier zero" infrastructure demands extreme fault tolerance. He shares the journey from 750-user consultancy to "growing like crazy", why operational excellence beats feature velocity, and what it actually costs to build databases that never go down. Episode notes: https://evilmartians.com/events/podcast-sam-lambert-planetscale Follow us on X: https://x.com/dpl_pod Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com Evil Martians is the go-to agency for early-stage developer tools startups: https://evilmartians.com/devtools Links: PlanetScale: https://planetscale.com/ Sam Lambert on X: https://x.com/isamlambert Evil Martians on X: https://x.com/evilmartians Victoria Melnikova on X: https://x.com/vmelnikova_en