Sharding: DIY or Out of the Box Solution? – Percona Live ONLINE Talk Preview

Percona Live Online Agenda Slot: Wed 21 Oct • New York 7:00 a.m. • London 12:00 noon • New Delhi 4:30 p.m. • Singapore 7:00 p.m.

Why is your talk exciting?

I’m not sure if my talk is exciting, but I’m quite positive the subject is! Vitess has been gaining a lot of traction over the past few years and I must admit that I’ve been keen to get hands-on experience with it for years. As we, MessageBird, encounter rapid growth standard (read) scaling wasn’t applicable anymore and we were in need for a solution. Late 2019 we implemented our (quick) DIY sharding solution based upon existing components. A few months later we encountered the next scaling issue and we found our own built solution wasn’t suitable in this case. That’s when we considered investing our time instead in a Vitess proof of concept (community edition) and this talk will compare the two paths chosen and show some of the choices and compromises you have to make.

Who would benefit the most from your talk?

People who need to shard their (write) workloads and are considering using Vitess for this purpose. Our intention is to do a fair comparison between the two to help others make a well prepared decision.

What other presentations are you most looking forward to?

The agenda is full of presentations I’m looking forward to. However as my current world is dominated by productionalising Vitess, I will be looking forward to Shlomi Noach’s talk about online schema migrations automation in Vitess. ∎