The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source The story of Vitess (Interview)
Apr 12, 2022
Deepthi Sigireddi, a maintainer and engineer at PlanetScale, shares her journey with Vitess, an open-source database that started at YouTube to solve outages. She discusses how Vitess handles sharding for scalability and its significance in the cloud-native landscape. Deepthi also touches on the thriving community behind Vitess and its transition to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Plus, explore the upcoming features in Vitess 13, focusing on user interface enhancements and improved query planning.
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Vitess's YouTube Origins
- Vitess originated at YouTube in 2010 to address frequent MySQL outages, focusing initially on connection pooling and query optimization.
- Despite open-sourcing Vitess in 2012, YouTube remained its sole user for the first five years.
Vitess's Spread Beyond YouTube
- Other companies with scaling challenges discovered Vitess through public talks and interviews given by its creators.
- Around 2015, these companies began adopting and using Vitess in production.
Abstract Sharding Logic with Vitess
- Use Vitess to abstract away sharding complexity from your application layer.
- This allows developers to focus on application logic without managing sharding details.
