AI inference just plays by different rules

The Register · 2 months ago

AI agents performing inference workloads generate unpredictable, concurrent data access patterns that overwhelm cloud storage systems designed for human-speed applications, requiring architectures that decouple performance from capacity. AWS EBS volumes experience burst credit exhaustion and latency spikes from 1 millisecond to 50+ milliseconds when AI inference traffic overwhelms the storage layer, as demonstrated by a fintech e-commerce platform whose AI shopping assistant caused a system-wide outage within 15 minutes of launch. Organizations must architect for extreme tail latency performance (p99/p999 under mixed load) and adopt software-defined storage solutions that can deliver consistent sub-millisecond latency even during concurrent OLTP and inference workloads, rather than attempting to scale through read replicas or additional IOPS provisioning.