Scalability Philosophy

Scalability problems can be solved using many approaches. This document describes Vitess’ approach to address these problems.

Small instances

When deciding to shard or break databases up into smaller parts, it’s tempting to break them just enough that they fit in one machine. In the industry, it’s common to run only one MySQL instance per host.

Vitess recommends that instances be broken up to be even smaller, and not to shy away from running multiple instances per host. The net resource usage would be about the same. But the manageability greatly improves when MySQL instances are small. There is the complication of keeping track of ports, and separating the paths for the MySQL instances. However, everything else becomes simpler once this hurdle is crossed.

There are fewer lock contentions to worry about, replication is a lot happier, production impact of outages become smaller, backups and restores run faster, and a lot more secondary advantages can be realized. For example, you can shuffle instances around to get better machine or rack diversity leading to even smaller production impact on outages, and improved resource usage.

Cloud Vs Baremetal

Although Vitess is designed to run in the cloud, it is entirely possible to run it on baremetal configs, and many users still do. If deploying in a cloud, the assignment of servers and ports is abstracted away from the administrator. On baremetal, the operator still has these responsibilities.

We provide sample configs to help you get started on Kubernetes since it’s the most similar to Borg (the predecessor to Kubernetes on which Vitess now runs in YouTube). If you’re more familiar with alternatives like Mesos, Swarm, Nomad, or DC/OS, we’d welcome your contribution of sample configs for Vitess.

These orchestration systems typically use containers to isolate small instances so they can be efficiently packed onto machines without contention on ports, paths, or compute resources. Then an automated scheduler does the job of shuffling instances around for failure resilience and optimum utilization.

Durability through replication

Traditional data storage software treated data as durable as soon as it was flushed to disk. However, this approach is impractical in today’s world of commodity hardware. Such an approach also does not address disaster scenarios.

The new approach to durability is achieved by copying the data to multiple machines, and even geographical locations. This form of durability addresses the modern concerns of device failures and disasters.

Many of the workflows in Vitess have been built with this approach in mind. For example, turning on semi-sync replication is highly recommended. This allows Vitess to failover to a new replica when a master goes down, with no data loss. Vitess also recommends that you avoid recovering a crashed database. Instead, create a fresh one from a recent backup and let it catch up.

Relying on replication also allows you to loosen some of the disk-based durability settings. For example, you can turn off sync_binlog, which greatly reduces the number of IOPS to the disk thereby increasing effective throughput.

Consistency model

Before sharding or moving tables to different keyspaces, the application needs to be verified (or changed) such that it can tolerate the following changes:

• Cross-shard reads may not be consistent with each other. Conversely, the sharding decision should also attempt to minimize such occurrences because cross-shard reads are more expensive.
• In “best-effort mode”, cross-shard transactions can fail in the middle and result in partial commits. You could instead use “2PC mode” transactions that give you distributed atomic guarantees. However, choosing this option increases the write cost by approximately 50%.

Single shard transactions continue to remain ACID, just like MySQL supports it.

If there are read-only code paths that can tolerate slightly stale data, the queries should be sent to REPLICA tablets for OLTP, and RDONLY tablets for OLAP workloads. This allows you to scale your read traffic more easily, and gives you the ability to distribute them geographically.

This tradeoff allows for better throughput at the expense of stale or possible inconsistent reads, since the reads may be lagging behind the master, as data changes (and possibly with varying lag on different shards). To mitigate this, VTGates are capable of monitoring replica lag and can be configured to avoid serving data from instances that are lagging beyond X seconds.

For true snapshot, the queries must be sent to the master within a transaction. For read-after-write consistency, reading from the master without a transaction is sufficient.

To summarize, these are the various levels of consistency supported:

• REPLICA/RDONLY read: Servers be scaled geographically. Local reads are fast, but can be stale depending on replica lag.
• MASTER read: There is only one worldwide master per shard. Reads coming from remote locations will be subject to network latency and reliability, but the data will be up-to-date (read-after-write consistency). The isolation level is READ_COMMITTED.
• MASTER transactions: These exhibit the same properties as MASTER reads. However, you get REPEATABLE_READ consistency and ACID writes for a single shard. Support is underway for cross-shard Atomic transactions.

As for atomicity, the following levels are supported:

• SINGLE: disallow multi-db transactions.
• MULTI: multi-db transactions with best effort commit.
• TWOPC: multi-db transactions with 2pc commit.

No multi-master

Vitess doesn’t support multi-master setup. It has alternate ways of addressing most of the use cases that are typically solved by multi-master:

• Scalability: There are situations where multi-master gives you a little bit of additional runway. However, since the statements have to eventually be applied to all masters, it’s not a sustainable strategy. Vitess addresses this problem through sharding, which can scale indefinitely.
• High availability: Vitess integrates with Orchestrator, which is capable of performing a failover to a new master within seconds of failure detection. This is usually sufficient for most applications.
• Low-latency geographically distributed writes: This is one case that is not addressed by Vitess. The current recommendation is to absorb the latency cost of long-distance round-trips for writes. If the data distribution allows, you still have the option of sharding based on geographic affinity. You can then setup masters for different shards to be in different geographic location. This way, most of the master writes can still be local.

Big data queries

There are two main ways to access the data for offline data processing (as opposed to online web or direct access to the live data): sending queries to rdonly servers, or using a Map Reduce framework.

Batch queries

These are regular queries, but they can consume a lot of data. Typically, the streaming APIs are used, to consume large quantities of data.

These queries are just sent to the rdonly servers (also known as batch servers). They can take as much resources as they want without affecting live traffic.

MapReduce

Vitess supports MapReduce access to the data. Vitess provides a Hadoop connector, that can also be used with Apache Spark. See the Hadoop package documentation for more information.

With a MapReduce framework, Vitess does not support very complicated queries. In part because it would be difficult and not very efficient, but also because the MapReduce frameworks are usually very good at data processing. So instead of doing very complex SQL queries and have processed results, it is recommended to just dump the input data out of Vitess (with simple select statements), and process it with a MapReduce pipeline.

Multi-cell

Vitess is meant to run in multiple data centers / regions / cells. In this part, we’ll use cell as a set of servers that are very close together, and share the same regional availability.

A cell typically contains a set of tablets, a vtgate pool, and app servers that use the Vitess cluster. With Vitess, all components can be configured and brought up as needed:

• The master for a shard can be in any cell. If cross-cell master access is required, vtgate can be configured to do so easily (by passing the cell that contains the master as a cell to watch).
• It is not uncommon to have the cells that can contain the master be more provisioned than read-only serving cells. These master-capable cells may need one more replica to handle a possible failover, while still maintaining the same replica serving capacity.
• Failing over from one master in one cell to a master in a different cell is no different than a local failover. It has an implication on traffic and latency, but if the application traffic also gets re-directed to the new cell, the end result is stable.
• It is also possible to have some shards with a master in one cell, and some other shards with their master in another cell. vtgate will just route the traffic to the right place, incurring extra latency cost only on the remote access. For instance, creating U.S. user records in a database with masters in the U.S. and European user records in a database with masters in Europe is easy to do. Replicas can exist in every cell anyway, and serve the replica traffic quickly.
• Replica serving cells are a good compromise to reduce user-visible latency: they only contain replica servers, and master access is always done remotely. If the application profile is mostly reads, this works really well.
• Not all cells need rdonly (or batch) instances. Only the cells that run batch jobs, or MapReduce jobs, really need them.

Note Vitess uses local-cell data first, and is very resilient to any cell going down (most of our processes handle that case gracefully).

Lock server

Vitess is a highly available service, and Vitess itself needs to store a small amount of metadata very reliably. For that purpose, Vitess needs a highly available and consistent data store.

Lock servers were built for this exact purpose, and Vitess needs one such cluster to be setup to run smoothly. Vitess can be customized to utilize any lock server, and by default it supports Zookeeper, etcd and Consul. We call this component Topology Service.

As Vitess is meant to run in multiple data centers / regions (called cells below), it relies on two different lock servers:

• global instance: it contains global meta data, like the list of Keyspaces / Shards, the VSchema, … It should be reliable and distributed across multiple cells. Running Vitess processes almost never access the global instance.
• per-cell instance (local): It should be running only in the local cell. It contains aggregates of all the global data, plus local running tablet information. Running Vitess processes get most of their topology data from the local instance.

This separation is key to higher reliability. A single cell going bad is never critical for Vitess, as the global instance is configured to survive it, and other cells can take over the production traffic. The global instance can be unavailable for minutes and not affect serving at all (it would affect VSchema changes for instance, but these are not critical, they can wait for the global instance to be back).

If Vitess is only running in one cell, both global and local instances can share the same lock service instance. It is always possible to split them later when expanding to multiple cells.

Monitoring

The most stressful part of running a production system is the situation where one is trying to troubleshoot an ongoing outage. You have to be able to get to the root cause quickly and find the correct remedy. This is one area where monitoring becomes critical and Vitess has been battle-tested. A large number of internal state variables and counters are continuously exported by Vitess through the /debug/vars and other URLs. There’s also work underway to integrate with third party monitoring tools like Prometheus.

Vitess errs on the side of over-reporting, but you can be picky about which of these variables you want to monitor. It’s important and recommended to plot graphs of this data because it’s easy to spot the timing and magnitude of a change. It’s also essential to set up various threshold-based alerts that can be used to proactively prevent outages.

Development workflow

Vitess provides binaries and scripts to make unit testing of the application code very easy. With these tools, we recommend to unit test all the application features if possible.

A production environment for a Vitess cluster involves a topology service, multiple database instances, a vtgate pool and at least one vtctld process, possibly in multiple data centers. The vttest library uses the vtcombo binary to combine all the Vitess processes into just one. The various databases are also combined into a single MySQL instance (using different database names for each shard). The database schema is initialized at startup. The (optional) VSchema is also initialized at startup.

A few things to consider:

• Use the same database schema in tests as the production schema.
• Use the same VSchema in tests as the production VSchema.
• When a production keyspace is sharded, use a sharded test keyspace as well. Just two shards is usually enough, to minimize test startup time, while still re-producing the production environment.
• vtcombo can also start the vtctld component, so the test environment is visible with the Vitess UI.
• See vttest.proto for more information.

Application query patterns

Although Vitess strives to minimize the app changes required to scale, there are some important considerations for application queries.

Commands specific to single MySQL instances

Since vitess represents a combined view of all MySQL instances, there are some operations it cannot reasonably perform in a backward compatible manner. For example:

• SET GLOBAL
• SHOW
• Binary log commands
• Other single keyspace administrative commands

However, Vitess allows you to target a single MySQL instance through an extended syntax of the USE statement. If so, it will allow you to execute some of these statements as pass-through.

Connecting to Vitess

If your application previously connected to master or replica instances through different hosts and ports, those parts will have to be changed to connect to a single load-balanced IP.

Instead, the database type will be specified as part of the db name. For example, to connect to a master, you would specify the dbname as db@master. For a replica, it would be db@replica.

Query support

A sharded Vitess is not 100% backward compatible with MySQL. Some queries that used to work will cease to work. It’s important that you run all your queries on a sharded test environment – see the Development workflow section above – to make sure none will fail on production.

Our goal is to expand query support based on the needs of users. If you encounter an important construct that isn’t supported, please create or comment on an existing feature request so we know how to prioritize.