Scaling Databases at Activision

A brief story of how we came to use Vitess/Kubernetes to power some of the biggest entertainment franchises on the planet A few years ago we started thinking about: “What would it look like to run a database on Kubernetes?” We had just migrated most of our workloads from VMs to Linux system containers. This unlocked a lot of performance potential, while being a mostly drop-in replacement. As our fleet grew and the on-call burden started to rear its head, we did some requirements gathering for running these databases using our new Kubernetes-based platform. We ended up testing a parallel track using several open source technologies. Months into the testing there was a very clear winner which met our requirements: Vitess. We spent the last few months of the year building a proof of concept for one of our smaller services, and launched it with that year’s major titles. The success of this spurred an increased interest in Vitess across Demonware/Activision leading to many larger services adopting it for the following year. This talk will mainly be about the transitional phases of moving from our classic database stack to Vitess. We will give a high level overview of the experience, what we learned, and some interesting points worth sharing to the wider community.