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
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.
The verdict
If your workload spends most of its life warm and your bill is dominated by steady throughput, Cobalt Fabric is easy to recommend. If you live at the cold edge, benchmark your own restore paths first.
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.
