Queue Third Eye Blind’s, “Graduate” because the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has announced its eighth distinguished graduate: Vitess.

“It is a great milestone of the effort made over the last 18+ months by a large team of contributors to help make Vitess work for more use-cases,” said Sugu Sougoumarane, CEO of PlanetScale and Vitess maintainer in an email to SDxCentral. 

The cloud-native database project was first introduced as an internal system created by YouTube for scaling large amounts of traffic using MySQL in 2010. 

Vitess solves this problem with built-in sharding, which is a type of database partitioning that separates large databases into smaller parts or shards. This feature allows companies to grow databases without adding sharding logic to the application.

The project is cloud agnostic, and it provides cloud portability and helps companies avoid vendor lock-in. It also supports automatic failover and recovery, replication, and rolling upgrades.

Vitess was the second cloud-based storage project accepted by the CNCF in 2018 — an announcement that came just one week after voting in its first storage project Rook.

Rook brings file, block, and object storage systems into the Kubernetes cluster. This allows the systems to run alongside other applications that use their data, and it makes the cloud-native cluster portable across public and private clouds.

“To use Amazon terminology, Rook is more like elastic block storage (EBS) in that it manages object storage or orchestrates systems that are already natively distributed (Yugabyte, CockroachDB, Cassandra). In this respect, the functionality is complementary,” Sougoumarane said. 

Vitess, on the other hand, turns MySQL into a distributed, scalable, self-healing database system and — according to Sougoumarane — provides a more direct upgrade path for existing MySQL-based applications that are looking to migrate to Kubernetes.  

“Vitess adopters often cite their comfort with managing large-scale MySQL databases and knowing both its performance characteristics and failure modes,” he added. “Because Vitess is MySQL under the hood, it is often seen as a lower-risk upgrade path than newer technologies.”  

Infrastructure and data are moving from the core to the edge, and according to a Gartner report released earlier this year 75% of all databases will be deployed or migrated to the cloud by 2022.

The use of cloud platforms for storage continues to grow as consumers, companies, and connected things and devices generate every-increasing volumes of data. And collecting, processing, and retrieving massive sets of data requires the right applications in the right places if enterprises are to create value from the data. 

Where old-school databases are unable to efficiently store and provide access to large volumes of data, relational databases offer ease and ubiquity. They also cater to skillsets of the broadest population of database professionals. The only glitch: relational databases scale up but not out, and this is a scale-out world. 

Vitess, on the other hand, is a database clustering system designed to horizontally scale MySQL. It deploys, scales, and manages large clusters of MySQL instances through a proxy layer above MySQL that relays protocol to applications and routing queries in underlying MySQL servers. Additionally, it manages the underlying MySQL servers, providing services such as failover.

“On a more philosophical level, Vitess encourages users to switch from using large, monolithic database servers to managing a fleet of database servers that have been horizontally scaled out,” Sougoumarane explained. “The ‘manage cattle not pets’ approach is really a fundamental property of cloud architectures and helps users operate more effectively in Kubernetes.”