When I recently started learning Vitess, I expected it to be complex and hard to grasp. What surprised me was how approachable it is and how many powerful features are built in. From automatic failover and high availability, to transparent query routing across shards, online schema changes without downtime, and VReplication for moving data seamlessly — Vitess handles challenges that typically require complex tooling in traditional MySQL environments.
In this session, I’ll walk through Vitess from a newcomer’s perspective: what I learned, what I wish I had known earlier, and how easy it is to explore these advanced capabilities even as a beginner. We’ll look at the architecture behind Vitess — components like vtgate, vttablet, and the topology service — and how they work together to deliver scalability and resilience.
If you’ve ever wondered how large systems scale MySQL reliably, or if you’re just getting started with distributed databases, this session will show you how Vitess makes it both possible and approachable.
