Announcing Vitess 11 | Hacker News Reader

Announcing Vitess 11

vitess.io

98 pointsksec46 comments

A few things I am really excited about in this release are the new protbuf compiler ( https://vitess.io/blog/2021-06-03-a-new-protobuf-generator-f... ) and the improvement on end to end speed ( https://benchmark.vitess.io/macrobench?ltag=10.0.0&rtag=11.0... )

Vitess was already one of the most performant distributed databases, this is really pushing the limits even further.

The last version, 10, brought in a scan resistant cache (the PR is interesting [1]). It would have made a fun blog post. Hopefully they can write more about the internals when they make these types of improvements.

[1] https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/pull/7439#issuecomment-77...

Vitess is "a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL."

Come on, folks. Never put out a press release without a simple description about what your thing even is.

It's not a press release, it's a blog post targeted at people who use the software.

And yet it was posted on Hacker News, where presumably most of the visitors do not use it.

Is the submitter the author of the blog post?

And yet it received enough votes to be on the front page, meaning enough visitors were aware of it or interested enough to spend 5 seconds investigating what it is!

Right….or you know, bots.

Sure, could be. Could even be full on HN solipsism where I’m the only real user and everyone else is a bot.

You’ve never noticed how some posts get way more upvotes than comments? Especially those introducing a product?

It is ridiculous if it is. I thought, HN was protected from such manipulations.

May be I should have included it in the title. ( But HN also has a rule for title not being edited ).

It is too late now, HN was down for about an hour and it is now outside the editing window. And while I do agree there should be a description on the front page of any project ( I am usually the one one rant about it ), I dont think such description is necessary in every changelog or release note.

We feel the same way, thanks.

Is Vitess still used by Youtube or did they eventually move to one of Google's internal planet-scale databases?

I heard that YouTube has migrated to Spanner already. YT was the last major user of MySQL at Google, the Googlers probably consider that as a snowflake and wanted to move away from it. Nothing wrong with Vitess itself.

AFAIK it's been done for a while (ex-Googler but non-YT, left recently).

Vitess was most definitely a special snowflake: most Google production servers don't even have disk anymore[0].

(There are a whole host of other reasons for doing Vitess->Spanner, all of which fall under "special snowflake infrastructure".)

[0] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/sre.google/en//st... (see ch2, diskless)

So what's the goto replication software to use for MySQL or Postgres these days?

If you use Oracle MySQL or Percona Server, I would recommend to try group replication[1], no third-party software required.

MariaDB can use something similar called Galera Cluster. Percona also has its own version, called Percona XtraCluster (PXC).

For more traditional MySQL/MariaDB replication typologies, Orchestrator[2] is a great tool.

For postgres, I have heard a lot of good words about Patroni[3], although I never used it myself.

[1]: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/group-replication.ht...

[2]: https://github.com/openark/orchestrator

[3]: https://github.com/zalando/patroni

Hi! I'm interested in scaling MariaDb with active-active replicas. They call it ring replication: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/replication-overview/

I would appreciate any comments. Specially on the upsides and downsides.

That's a footgun.

For ring replication to work, it requires all replication sources (aka. "masters") to be online at all times. This never happens in real life, so it is just a matter of time that you get a nasty split-brain. Star replication tries to mitigate this by a crazy setup with replication filters that is painful to maintain and probably will break after some DDL statements.

Moreover, neither of these can handle conflicts. If a row gets updated on different hosts at the same time, you will get broken replication and/or split-brain.

To scale writes, sharding is usually the way to go and Vitess can be handy for that. By the way, MySQL group replication has multi-primary mode that is safer. Galera Cluster/PXC probably has something similar but I am not completely sure.

Thank you! I'll be looking into Galera then.

This.

I would definitely say pg-auto-failover[1]. It's the only one that doesn't have a ton of moving parts, and it helps you get a good base setup too at the same time.

[1]: https://github.com/citusdata/pg_auto_failover

I completely missed the news that Microsoft acquired Citrus back in 2019.

I noticed in their MIT like license it referred to Microsoft and was confused until I learned they were acquired.

https://github.com/citusdata/pg_auto_failover/blob/master/LI...

You need 1 extra server for the "monitor" process. And it can't yet auto-failover the monitor node, no ?

GCP Product Managers, here’s an idea that will rain you with cash: managed vitess to replace the severely underpowered cloudsql offering.

Or even better, something like PlanetScale [1]. It was founded by the maintainers of Vitess.

[1]: https://www.planetscale.com/

Unfortunately their infrastructure is only in the US, so latency is a deal breaker from Europe

They'll also help you host Vitess, not sure if it's fully managed or not, but that'd get it in your cluster / region.

This is cool. Exactly the product I wanted for hosting my side projects without paying the exorbitant price for a MySQL instance on AWS or GCP.

It seems like a large contributor to vitess and another tool orchestrator linked in another post is Slack? Very interesting.

Slack uses Vitess: https://slack.engineering/scaling-datastores-at-slack-with-v...

Just need something like this for postgres and we would jump on it. Citus is close, but all the features that are important are behind their exceptionally tall paywall.

We are seeing a bunch of folks moving away from Postgres over to MySQL + Vitess for this reason. Including a major website that we will be able to talk about soon.

For their hosted system, it's not particularly worse than hosted Postgres on RDS. RDS costs $0.50/hr for a 4 core/32GB db.r5.xlarge. Azure-hosted Citus for multi-node workloads on a similarly sized node are $0.618/node/hr. Both double in price to have a high availability backup cluster.

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/pricing/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/postgresql...

Of course, the answer is that both are insane markups. But it's worth being able to focus on other things!

Is that still the case? The shard rebalancer was Open Sourced recently; what features do you need that are still not open sourced?

1: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2021/03/13/scaling-out-postgr...

2. https://www.citusdata.com/product/comparison

There's Yugabyte (top half of Postgres with bottom half proprietary DocDB data layer) or CockroachDB (completely new stack) if you just want scalable Postgres-flavored SQL.

https://www.yugabyte.com/

https://www.cockroachlabs.com/

planetscaledb uses vitess under the scenes

I hope they improved their service though. The promise is great but last time I tried them it was a very slow and buggy experience.

Hey, I am sorry you had a bad experience on the platform. We released as a beta and have made rapid improvements. I am confident if you give us another try you will have a better experience.

If you have feedback or want to chat feel free to email me: sam@planetscale.com

Please prioritize the standard connection string access method: https://github.com/planetscale/beta/discussions/15

This single feature would open up a lot of usage for me and many others I know.

This is shipping in August. Apologies for the wait.

It definitely need a FAQ somewhere, from Backup, Uptime Guarantee, to where are the Server / DC located, etc.

Hey Sam I checked Planetscale few weeks ago, it seems incredibly promising ... But having it only in the US is a deal breaker from Europe

We have an EU region launching within weeks. Thank you for checking us out and hanging in there.

Will definitely give it a try again, thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com