Cloud native database system reaches version 4.0 with focus on usability and performance

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – November 5, 2019 – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced that Vitess is the eighth project to graduate, following Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, CoreDNS, containerd, Fluentd, and Jaeger. To move from the maturity level of incubation to graduation, projects must demonstrate thriving adoption, a documented, structured governance process, and a strong commitment to community, sustainability, and inclusivity.

Originally created in 2010 as an internal solution by YouTube for scaling large amounts of storage using MySQL, Vitess is a cloud native database system.

In addition to graduating, Vitess today reached version 4.0, which includes significant improvements to SQL query support, experimental support for VReplication, and a big focus on usability to make starting easier for new users. To learn more about Vitess 4.0, read the announcement blog post.

“Battle-tested at YouTube during a time of massive growth and running at other internet scale organizations, Vitess has proven its capability to scale huge amounts of storage in a cloud native architecture,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO/COO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “Vitess has lowered the barrier to entry for organizations using MySQL to be cloud native. We look forward to seeing what the project accomplishes beyond graduation.”

Vitess became a CNCF Incubation project in February 2018. It supported Kubernetes since before Kubernetes reached 1.0, and it now integrates with and makes use of many other cloud native projects including etcd, gRPC, and Prometheus. The “database scaler is secure and robust,” indicated a third-party security audit funded by CNCF and performed in February 2019.

“Vitess was created to solve a real challenge for a real company – and this happened to lead to us creating a tool that addressed the needs of many organizations running databases in production,” said Sugu Sougoumarane, co-founder and CTO of Planetscale and Vitess co-creator. “Since then, our focus has been on stability and creating a great experience for new users. We are incredibly proud to graduate from CNCF alongside a number of today’s most successful projects. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with the community.”

Companies like GitHub, JD.com, Pinterest, Slack, Square, Stitch Labs, and YouTube are using Vitess across various stages of production and deployment. Over the last 12 months, more than 130 contributors have authored pull requests. The maintainer team currently consists of 14 members, with a healthy distribution of corporations represented including HubSpot, Pinterest, Nozzle, PlanetScale, Slack, Square, and others.

“Vitess has been a clear success for Slack,” said Michael Demmer, principal engineer at Slack. “The project has both been more complicated and harder to do than anybody could have forecast, but at the same time, Vitess has performed in its promised role a lot better than people had hoped for. Our goal is that all MySQL at Slack is run behind Vitess. There’s no other bet we’re making in terms of storage in the foreseeable future.”

“Vitess helped the team grow their technical knowledge and strength in the areas of scalable management and elastic database(s),” said Haifeng Liu, chief architect at JD Retail. “The fact that Vitess is a neutral CNCF project means we can significantly benefit from working with a large number of developers and end users in the most active and fast-growing open source community.”

“Vitess has paved the way for us to unify all of our data storage infrastructure and our microservice infrastructure onto Kubernetes, and it’s giving us a blueprint for what the rest of our data stores might look like on Kubernetes,” said Alex Charis, senior software engineer at HubSpot. “That’s been a great win for us as an infrastructure team.”

To officially graduate from incubating status, the project also defined transparent project governance and guiding principles, and achieved passing level criteria for CII Best Practices.

Vitess Background

Vitess is a cloud native database system that helps users migrate their stateful workloads to Kubernetes. It scales storage horizontally, while presenting a MySQL compatible interface to applications. This makes it easy for application developers to adopt, with typically only minimal code changes required. Vitess has been a core component of YouTube’s database infrastructure since 2011, and has grown to encompass tens of thousands of MySQL nodes.

For more about Vitess, please visit vitess.io.

Additional Resources

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors, and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 500 members, including the world’s largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

###

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact

Jessie Adams-Shore

The Linux Foundation

PR@CNCF.io