Vitess Roadmap

Vitess is an active open source project. Here is a list of recent and upcoming features the team is focused on: Check with us on our forums for more information.

Vitess before 2.0 GA

Vitess has been used internally by YouTube for a few years now, but the first public versions lacked polish and documentation. Version 1.0 was mostly an internal release.

Vitess 2.0 GA

Vitess 2.0 GA was created on July 11, 2016. It was the first major public release.

It contains all the core features of the Vitess product:

• Advanced data access:

  • Automatic query routing to actively serving instances.
  • Scalability through sharding, with transparent access to sharded data, without need for proprietary API.
  • Map-Reduce support for data warehousing queries.
  • Limit the negative impact of bad queries.

• Advanced manageability features:

  • Orchestrator integration, auto-reparent on master failure.
  • Out-of-the-box support for Kubernetes
  • No-downtime dynamic resharding.
  • Expose data for advanced monitoring and bad query detection.

Vitess 2.1

Vitess 2.1 is actively being worked on. Apart from the multiple small changes we've been making to address a number of small issues, we are adding the following core features:

• Support for distributed transactions, using 2 phase commit.

• Resharding workflow improvements, to increase manageability of the process.

• Online schema swap, to apply complex schema changes without any downtime.

• New dynamic UI (vtctld), rewritten from scratch in Angular 2. We will still have the old UI in Vitess 2.1 as a fallback, but it will be removed in Vitess 2.2.

• Update Stream functionality, for applications to subscribe to a change stream (for cache invalidation, for instance).

• Improved Map-Reduce support, for tables with non-uniform distributions.

• Increase large installation scalability with two-layer vtgate pools (l2vtgate, applicable to 100+ shard installations).

• Better Kubernetes support (Helm support, better scripts, ...).

• New implementations of the topology services for Zookeeper (zk2) and etcd (etcd2). In Vitess 2.1 they will become the recommended implementations and the old zookeeper and etcd will be deprecated. In Vitess 2.2 only the new zk2 and etcd2 implementations will remain, so please migrate after upgrade to Vitess 2.1.

• Added support for Consul topology service client.

• Initial version of the Master Buffering feature. It allows for buffering master traffic while a failover is in progress, and trade downtime with extra latency.

We already cut the 2.1.0-alpha.1 release, and we are finalizing the last details at the moment. Release ETA is around beginning of 2017.

Vitess Moving Forward

The following list contains areas where we want to focus next, after the current set of changes. Let us know if one of these areas is of particular interest to your application!

Data Access

• Additional support for cross-shard constructs (IN clause, ordering and filtering, ...).

• ExecuteBatch improvements (to increase performance of bulk imports for instance).

• Multi-value inserts (across shards or not).

Manageability

• Better support for MySQL DDL constructs.

• Support for MySQL 8.0.

• Additional Kubernetes integration.

• Include resharding workflows in the control panel UI (vtctld).

• Support vertical splits to an existing keyspace, so any table can be moved around to any keyspace. Only for unsharded keyspaces, at first.

• Out-of-the-box integration with Promotheus for monitoring.

Scaling

• Better resource utilization / less CPU usage.

Future Work

We are considering integration/implementation of the following technologies in our roadmap. For specific features, reach out to us to discuss opportunities to collaborate or prioritize some of the work:

• Integration with Mesos and DC/OS.

• Integration with Docker Swarm.

• Improved support for row-based replication (for Update Stream for instance).

• Better integration with Apache Spark (native instead of relying on Hadoop InputSource).