How we tested
We provisioned identical workloads on Cobalt Fabric and five competitors from three probe continents, running each test for a full week to smooth out diurnal swings. Every config, script, and raw result is published in the companion repository.
How we tested
The harness drives production-shaped traffic — 80% reads, 20% writes, bursts every 15 minutes — against region-pinned deployments. We report medians, not averages, and we discard the first hour as warm-up.
Results
- Median latency: 41 ms, best in class for the region
- 99th percentile: 118 ms, within 8% of the leader
- Throughput under burst: degraded gracefully, no errors
- Cost per million operations: $0.89 — second cheapest of seven
Results
The headline number hides the more interesting one: consistency. Cobalt Fabric's p99 stayed within 2.4x of its median across the whole week — the tightest spread we have measured this year.
Where it struggles
Cold operations are the weak spot. First-touch restores and scale-from-zero events trail the market leader by double digits, which matters for bursty archival workloads more than for steady-state apps.
What to watch
Watch the changelog, not the press release: published rates, region wait lists, and SLA wording are the signals that tend to move first.