Geo-partitioning with Vitess

Geo-partitioning is an emerging requirement for multinational corporations. Laws such as the GDPR in Europe stipulate where a users data needs to be physically located, as well as when it can be tran …

Geo-partitioning is an emerging requirement for multinational corporations. Laws such as the GDPR in Europe stipulate where a user’s data needs to be physically located, as well as when it can be transferred out of the EU. We expect additional legal jurisdictions to pass similar laws in the coming years, and that database management systems will require native functionality to assist in compliance. In the case of Vitess, one of its distinguishing features is support for flexible sharding schemes. This can easily be extended to support a custom sharding scheme that respects geo-partitioning requirements. In this deep dive we will first explore how and then demonstrate a database cluster built using the custom sharding scheme that solves data residency at the database layer obviating the need for any change at the application layer.