Why Your Database Fails in AWS (And It’s Not the Database’s Fault)

Cloud-managed databases promise high availability, automatic failover, and operational simplicity. Yet production outages keep happening — even when the database engine itself is healthy.

In this session, we explore why databases fail in AWS environments for reasons that have nothing to do with query plans or indexing strategies.

Drawing from real-world DevOps and cloud architecture experience, this talk examines the infrastructure and platform decisions that silently undermine database reliability, including: • EBS burst credit exhaustion and IOPS misconfiguration • Instance class limitations (CPU credits, network throughput, memory pressure) • Multi-AZ failover misconceptions • Storage autoscaling and hidden latency tradeoffs • Backup strategies that were never validated • Monitoring gaps between infrastructure and database metrics

We’ll break down how these issues manifest in production, why traditional database monitoring often misses them, and how to design resilient architectures that prevent them.

Attendees will leave with practical architectural patterns, validation strategies, and operational checklists they can immediately apply to improve reliability — whether running MySQL, PostgreSQL, or managed services like RDS.

Because sometimes the database isn’t broken — the cloud architecture is.