Learning about Vitess (“A database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL”) is straightforward enough, as is running the Get Started demo on your computer. But once you want to start scaling out a sandbox cluster, or want to run realistic benchmarks against your schema design (both of which are hard to do on a personal computer), setting up a full cluster in a pinch seems daunting… or is it?
I’m here to show you, with a live demo/tutorial, that deploying and evaluating a Vitess sandbox cluster, into a public cloud environment, can be done super easily. In fact, my aim is to bootstrap a fully functioning cluster within 10 minutes of starting the demo.
With the remaining demo time, I will demonstrate other Vitess operations, such as:
Scaling up and down the cluster
– Increasing and decreasing the number of shards without losing data
– Configure zonal SSDs for MySQL
– Backup and restore (so you can shut down the cluster to save money or discard an experiment, then bring it back up again with the original data)
– Deploy the experimental Vitess orchestrator component
– Planned and unplanned failovers
– Automatic rolling upgrades, and controlled rolling upgrades
– Metrics, dashboards
Even with the best possible documentation (and the Vitess documentation is quite good!), getting a fully working cluster, experimenting with it, and getting everything configured the way you want can involve a bunch of trial and error. I hope that my demo can help you bypass some of the more boring trial-and-error, and get running more quickly with your Vitess evaluation.
For this demo, I will be using the excellent open-source Vitess-operator for Kubernetes, provided by PlanetScale. Even if you aren’t considering deploying Vitess on Kubernetes in production, I still highly recommend it for sandbox use. Deploying an arbitrary number of components is super trivial with the operator, and everything auto-wires automatically. No need to delay your evaluation by needing to manually bootstrap a cluster one node at a time, or write your own deployment tools.
Speaker: Jordan Moldow – Box Inc.