Smooth scaling: Slacks journey toward a new database

Slacks rapid growth over the last few years outpaced the original databases scaling capacity, which negatively impacted the company's customers and engineers. Ameet Kotian explains how a small team of engineers embarked on a journey for the right database solution, which eventually led them to Vitess, an open source cluster database.

Slack has experienced tremendous growth for a young company, serving over nine million weekly active customers. But with great growth comes greater growth pains. Slack’s rapid growth over the last few years outpaced the scaling capacity of its original sharded MySQL database, which negatively impacted the company’s customers and engineers. Ameet Kotian explains how a small team of engineers embarked on a journey for the right database solution, which eventually led them to Vitess, a powerful open source database cluster solution for MySQL. Vitess combines the features of MySQL with the scalability of a NoSQL database. It has been serving Youtube’s traffic for numerous years and has a strong community. Although Vitess meets a lot of Slack’s needs, it’s not an out-of-the-box solution. Ameet shares how the journey to Vitess was planned and executed, with little customer impact, in the face of piling operational challenges, such as AWS issues, MySQL replication, automatic failovers, deployments strategies, and so forth. Ameet also covers Vitess’s architecture, trade-offs, and what the future of Vitess looks like at Slack.