Self-managed Vitess vs Managed Vitess with PlanetScale

This post details the significant resources, time, and expertise required to self-manage Vitess, citing examples from Slack and Square to illustrate the complexities of implementation, migration, and ongoing maintenance. It highlights challenges such as MySQL compatibility, sharding strategy, server provisioning, operational processes (deployment, service discovery, backup/restore, topology management), application integration, double-writes, and handling production issues like deadlocks and scatter queries. In contrast, it positions PlanetScale as a managed solution that simplifies Vitess cluster creation and enhances the developer experience with features like database branching and deploy requests, thereby reducing the operational burden compared to self-hosting.