kdavyd

The article doesn't mention which EBS volume type was used, but since Provisioned IOPS are mentioned, I assume it's gp3 or io2. One pattern that is especially often used in Time Series databases, but could work for Kafka too, is not tiering down to S3, but changing older volumes to a slower volume type, such as sc1 ($0.015/GiB-Mo). This can be done completely transparently to the application.

Another thing worth looking into is S3 Mountpoint with or without read caching, which offers a POSIX-like interface for S3 to applications that don't natively support S3.

Hurricane Ike put most of the oil processing plants in the Houston area offline, which led to a US-wide spike in gas prices. I've been there when it happened and it wasn't pretty.

No they don't. They create the pool based on the ashift that the drives report, unless you override it at pool creation.