Mysql on cloudplz

Aurora Migration Toolkit

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Migrating a single database to Aurora is a project. Migrating fifty — including multi-terabyte, tier-0 systems with 24/7 write traffic — is a platform. This is the toolkit and methodology that made it repeatable.

Challenge

Each team’s database had different constraints: replication lag budgets, change-freeze windows, version skew between on-premises MySQL and Aurora, and applications that had grown assumptions about their database over a decade. One-off migration plans did not scale to fifty of them.

Vitess Production Deployment

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Running Vitess in production for three years teaches you where horizontal scaling actually bites: ops discipline, not demos. This is the record of what it took to run the system that powers YouTube’s MySQL fleet, at a scale far smaller than YouTube’s — and why that changes the calculus.

Challenge

A MySQL deployment outgrowing vertical scale: write volume and working set exceeding what a single well-tuned instance could absorb, with availability requirements that ruled out naive primary failover.

Vitess vs Aurora: Making the Right MySQL Scaling Decision

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve outgrown single-instance MySQL, you’re facing an uncomfortable choice: build custom sharding logic into your application, migrate to a different database system, or adopt a clustering solution like Vitess.

Here’s the short version, so you know whether to keep reading: after running Vitess in production for 3 years, we migrated off it — to Aurora. Not because Vitess failed us, but because the one capability that justified its operational cost (horizontal write sharding) turned out to be a capability we never actually needed. If your write traffic genuinely exceeds what one large primary can take — think tens of thousands of writes per second sustained, not bursts — Vitess is likely your answer and this post will tell you what operating it really costs. If you’re below that bar, Aurora is almost certainly the better decision, and this post will tell you why.