Vitess is a sharding and scaling solution for MySQL that can make thousands of databases appear to be a single monolithic database. Vitess is interesting, and promising, in a number of ways. It’s addressing an extremely hard set of problems that’s been tried many times before with mixed results, but evidence points to Vitess succeeding where others have thus far failed.
Vitess solves three fundamental, hard problems for its target user base:
- Sharding. Sharding is essential for scaling traditional relational databases that weren’t built natively to operate as a distributed cluster of many nodes forming a single database. Every large-scale MySQL deployment—and there are thousands—uses sharding, bar none.
- Kubernetes deployment. You can’t just run a database like MySQL on Kubernetes without a robust suite of operational tooling for high availability. MySQL …