Sharding advice on the internet has a survivorship problem: the companies writing about it are usually the ones operating the largest datasets. Many workloads stay on one primary with replicas for their entire lifetime.
An unsharded Vitess keyspace behaves like plain MySQL while adding connection pooling, online schema changes, and automated failover. Shard-key selection can wait until production access patterns provide useful evidence.
When a table outgrows one machine, MoveTables and resharding workflows are already available, reviewable, verifiable with VDiff, and reversible. The application retains the same endpoint throughout the transition.
Run it yourself.
Everything on this blog describes the platform you can provision today.