Vitess: Introduction and New Features

Vitess is a cloud-native storage solution that can scale indefinitely. It was initially developed as a MySQL scaling solution at YouTube but has evolved into a cloud-native database with CNCF graduated project. Vitess is highly scalable, available, and runs on any configuration. It consists of multiple physical databases and for each of those physical databases, a component called a vt tablet takes over the management of those physical databases. Traffic to the Vitess cluster is routed through another component called vtgate, which serves as a gateway to the cluster. Applications interact with vtgate as if it were a single MySQL instance. VTAdmin is the next generation of tooling and UIs for managing large-scale, multi-cluster Vitess deployments, built for developers and operators alike.

• Vitess is a cloud-native storage solution that can scale indefinitely
• Vitess is highly scalable, available, and runs on any configuration
• Vitess consists of multiple physical databases and for each of those physical databases, a component called a vt tablet takes over the management of those physical databases
• Traffic to the Vitess cluster is routed through another component called vtgate, which serves as a gateway to the cluster
• Applications interact with vtgate as if it were a single MySQL instance
• VTAdmin is the next generation of tooling and UIs for managing large-scale, multi-cluster Vitess deployments, built for developers and operators alike

JD.com and Slack are some of the biggest users of Vitess, running it in their own hardware, in the cloud, and in Kubernetes. Vitess is MySQL compatible and runs against any MySQL flavor community enterprise percona mariadb etc. It does not work with Postgres as of now. Vitess is massively scalable, and there are implementations that are running literally millions of queries per second with no problems.

Vitess is a cloud-native storage solution that can scale indefinitely. In this session, we will first cover a high level overview of Vitess features, the architecture, and what database workloads are a good fit. Then we will demonstrate how to get started with Vitess on Kubernetes. This will be followed by VTAdmin, the next generation of tooling and UIs for managing large-scale, multi-cluster Vitess deployments, built for developers and operators alike. We will demo resharding using VTAdmin, and will talk about improvements to performance and scalability along the way.