A recent incident where an application experienced severe slowdowns despite normal CPU and memory metrics turned out to be a classic AWS EBS gp3 throughput limit issue. The disk IO utilization hit 100%, causing latency spikes. The investigation revealed that the gp3 volume's baseline throughput was insufficient for the workload's I/O pattern. This case highlights a common pitfall: assuming gp3 volumes automatically scale without monitoring throughput. The author shares a systematic checklist for EBS performance debugging, including checking volume type, burst credits, and CloudWatch metrics. For DevOps and SRE teams, this is a timeless reminder to monitor not just IOPS but also throughput limits on gp3 volumes. The checklist can be adapted for any cloud provider's block storage, making it a valuable evergreen resource.
A practical case study on diagnosing AWS EBS gp3 throughput limits, offering a reusable checklist for cloud engineers.