# Vitess

14 Hacker News commenters recommended Vitess and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Open-source MySQL sharding system that makes many servers look like one; praised as battle tested at scale. Caveat: sharding often requires redesigning schemas and shard keys.

## Why people recommend it

- Proven at large scale (3 comments): "massively successful, proven-to-be-scalable open source tool" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46962763)) "Vitess with MySQL is about as battle tested as it gets" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49398166)) "used in production by YouTube" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49246112))
- Scales from small to petabytes (2 comments): "It's why Neki and Vitess are so powerful for everything from small 1GB databases to petabytes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49160316)) "has a better scaling story(Vitess)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47607786))
- Actively developed and maintained (2 comments): "We continue to invest in and improve Vitess. It's a substantial and growing part of our business." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650397)) "Vitess for MySQL, which we maintain" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49161561))

## What people warn about

- Requires schema and shard key redesign (2 comments): "spending too many time for every time make table and shard key design" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49566247)) "Looks like it's not drop-in, you need to heavily modify your data and indexes structurally to make sharding performant." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48932705))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [PgDog](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pgdog.md): 38 recommend
- [PgBouncer](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pgbouncer.md): 37 recommend
- [Multigres](https://hackerapproved.com/p/multigres.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Vitess", https://hackerapproved.com/p/vitess/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).