Platform / Vitess

Managed Vitess for horizontally scaled MySQL.

Vitess is the battle-hardened technology from YouTube for running large fleets of MySQL. CheapDB operates it for you: sharding, failover, pooling, and online schema changes on hardware you can see.

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Why Vitess

Scale MySQL like the largest sites on the internet.

Scalability with sharding

Distribute data across as many servers as the workload needs, vertically or horizontally, while the application still sees a single logical database.

Read about sharding

High availability

Replicated MySQL with automated failure detection and failover. VTGate buffers queries during promotion, so most failovers pass unnoticed.

Connection pooling

VTGate and VTTablet pool application connections before they reach MySQL, increasing connection capacity across the fleet.

Online schema changes

Schema deploys are reviewable, non-blocking, and revertable. Operators can start, monitor, cancel, and roll back each migration.

MySQL compatibility

Compatibility with most MySQL syntax and features preserves existing drivers, protocols, and application query paths during migration.

Kubernetes-native

Vitess was built to run on cluster schedulers. CheapDB operates it with the vitess-operator on infrastructure you can inspect.

How it works

One endpoint, many shards.

Applications connect to VTGate, which proxies connections and routes each query to the right keyspace and shard. VTTablet mediates every query into MySQL, pools connections, and monitors instance health.

A cluster can start unsharded — every table on one primary with replicas — and later split across shards with MoveTables workflows, verified by VDiff, while the application retains the same endpoint.

          ┌───────────────────────────┐
          │          VTGate           │
          └─────────────┬─────────────┘
            ┌───────────┴───────────┐
            ▼                       ▼
   ╔═════════════╗         ╔═════════════╗
   ║ Primary -80 ║         ║ Primary 80- ║
   ╚══════╤══════╝         ╚══════╤══════╝
      ┌───┴────┐              ┌───┴────┐
      ▼        ▼              ▼        ▼
  ┌───────┐ ┌───────┐     ┌───────┐ ┌───────┐
  │Replica│ │Replica│     │Replica│ │Replica│
  └───────┘ └───────┘     └───────┘ └───────┘

“Vitess was developed at YouTube to scale MySQL to petabytes across tens of thousands of nodes. The same architecture runs Slack, GitHub, and Etsy. CheapDB operates that architecture as a managed service.”

— Why we bet on Vitess, CheapDB

Vitess grows from one keyspace to many shards.

An unsharded keyspace starts with familiar MySQL behavior and retains a tested path to MoveTables and resharding workflows.

Create a cluster Learn about sharding

┌───────────────────────────┐ │ VTGate │ └─────────────┬─────────────┘ ┌───────────┴───────────┐ ▼ ▼ ╔═════════════╗ ╔═════════════╗ ║ Primary -80 ║ ║ Primary 80- ║ ╚══════╤══════╝ ╚══════╤══════╝ ┌───┴────┐ ┌───┴────┐ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ┌───────┐ ┌───────┐ ┌───────┐ ┌───────┐ │Replica│ │Replica│ │Replica│ │Replica│ └───────┘ └───────┘ └───────┘ └───────┘