---
title: "Vitess"
description: "2 posts about Vitess, summarised, each linking to the original."
---

# Vitess
> 2 posts about Vitess, summarised, each linking to the original.

## Articles

### [Ready for your busiest day: How we scale](https://yomu.fyi/post/ready-for-your-busiest-day-how-we-scale.md)
- Company: [Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom.md)
- Author: Ryan Sherlock
- Published: May 19, 2026
- Type: Explainer

Fin describes how its customer service platform is designed to absorb high-volume events while preserving customer isolation, availability, and operational control. At daily peaks, it handles over 150,000 customer requests per second and more than 70,000 asynchronous requests per second; its source-of-truth data spans 128 Vitess shards, while Elasticsearch supports over 650TB, 1.7 trillion documents, and peaks above 40,000 requests per second. The architecture favors AWS primitives, Vitess managed by PlanetScale, online and incremental migrations, fair queues, feature flags, heartbeat metrics, and automatic rollback, with roughly 250 production ships per workday and merge-to-production time under 10 minutes. The stated conclusion is that scale depends less on headline capacity than on clear scaling levers, tenant fairness, customer-outcome monitoring, reversible change, and routine infrastructure improvement without planned customer-impacting downtime.


### [Migrating Etsy’s database sharding to Vitess](https://yomu.fyi/post/migrating-etsy-s-database-sharding-to-vitess.md)
- Company: [Etsy](https://yomu.fyi/company/etsy.md)
- Author: Ella Yarmo-Gray
- Published: Mar 19, 2026
- Type: Problem & solution

Etsy migrated its long-running MySQL shard management to Vitess vindexes after an architecture spanning about 1,000 tables and shards, 425 TB of data, and roughly 1.7 million requests per second. The legacy ORM used a single index database to map records to shards, creating a scaling bottleneck and single point of failure. To avoid moving existing data, engineers built custom SQLite lookup and hybrid vindexes, changed new shard assignments to match Vitess’s hash algorithm, and introduced routing incrementally table by table with traffic ramps, rollback, and query compatibility testing. After five years, about 2,500 pull requests, and 6,000 queries, the migration removed the index database dependency, made scaling operations take days rather than months, simplified developer access, and kept database performance largely unchanged without a mass data migration.