Case Study: Barstool Sports eliminates outages and cuts database costs with PlanetScale

In 15 minutes, Barstool Sports saved millions in outage avoidance

Barstool Sports, one of the world’s largest podcast platforms, was running its cloud-native media stack on Amazon Aurora Serverless and struggled with database scaling and outages as traffic grew. Its serverless architecture outpaced Aurora’s ability to add read replicas quickly, creating a mismatch in velocity and forcing the team to deal with expensive, time-consuming DevOps work.

Barstool Sports switched to PlanetScale, using a MySQL-compatible database that supported query collapsing, connection pooling, and easy migrations without needing an orchestration layer. The team cut over in 15 minutes after testing PlanetScale alongside Aurora, eliminated outages, and said they saved 20–30% in costs while avoiding major downtime that had previously cost millions.

Barstool Sports

Andrew Barba

Barstool Sports