Codename VIFL - How to Migrate MySQL Database Clusters to Vitess

Guido Iaquinti, Rafael Chacon at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020

Have you ever considered migrating a database system at scale with no downtime? Many of us that have tried, often find it an insurmountable challenge for both developers and database engineers. Most of the time, companies start these kinds of migrations and leave them half done. This creates significant toil and costs in operations teams that have to pay the cost of running both legacy and new systems indefinitely. In this talk, Rafael and Guido will discuss how they designed and built a migration framework and then executed it to move petabytes of data from Slack's legacy database architecture to Vitess with zero downtime. The approach proposed in this framework is transparent to the application and didn't require coordination with the rest of the engineering team. It is also general enough that people considering migrating to Vitess can leverage it in their own environments.

https://sched.co/ekF5