How teams scaled Vitess: 4 real case studies
4 of the 94 engineering write-ups in our database mention Vitess in their stack. They come from 4 companies (GitHub, PlanetScale, Shopify and Slack) and were published between 2020 and 2024. Techniques that show up most often alongside Vitess: horizontal sharding (3) and database migration (2). It's often paired with MySQL (4) and Ruby on Rails (2). 2 of the 4 state concrete scale numbers, for example "1 million QPS" (PlanetScale). Each card below links to our short summary and the original post.
Two of these stories are Ruby on Rails apps: how GitHub and Shopify scaled Rails on MySQL.
Horizontally scaling the Rails backend of Shop app with Vitess
Shopify's Shop app adopted Vitess to shard its Rails backend, covering keyspace design and the migration plan.
One million queries per second with MySQL
PlanetScale benchmarked a horizontally sharded Vitess cluster up to one million QPS.
Partitioning GitHub's relational databases to handle scale
GitHub defined schema domains and linted cross-domain queries so it could move table groups onto separate MySQL clusters.
Scaling Datastores at Slack with Vitess
Slack's multi-year migration from active-active MySQL pairs to Vitess, so data could be sharded by any key, not only workspace.