The Cloud Native Computing Foundation today announced that Vitess, a database clustering system it took under its wing two years ago, has graduated incubation, becoming the eighth open-source project to achieve the milestone to date.

Vitess was born in 2010 from an internal development program at YouTube. The Google LLC subsidiary needed an easier way to manage its deployment of MySQL, the world’s most popular open-source database, which the video platform and countless other organizations use to store their structured data. 

MySQL has achieved widespread adoption by providing a robust feature set that lends itself to a variety of use cases. However, the database is lacking in a key area: support for horizontal scaling, or the ability to spread out a deployment across a large number of servers. That’s an essential feature for big companies such as YouTube.

Vitess fills the gap, enabling enterprises to take a collection of MySQL servers and combine them into one big, horizontally scalable cluster they can expand with additional machines as needed. It also automates several related tasks such as backups. Workloads can access Vitess through an interface that closely resembles the one provided by MySQL, which means developers don’t have to make any major changes to their applications after installing the system.

Vitess can be deployed on practically any kind of infrastructure. That includes, among others, cloud and on-premises software container environments powered by Kubernetes. 

YouTube is not the only major tech firm using Vitess internally. Other notable adopters include Slack Technologies Inc., HubSpot Inc., Pinterest Inc. and Square Inc. to name a few. 

“Vitess has been a clear success for Slack,” said Michael Demmer, a principal engineer at the company. “The project has both been more complicated and harder to do than anybody could have forecast, but at the same time, Vitess has performed in its promised role a lot better than people had hoped for. Our goal is that all MySQL at Slack is run behind Vitess. There’s no other bet we’re making in terms of storage in the foreseeable future.”

Vitess is managed by a team of 14 core maintainers who collaborate with a community of more than 100 contributors. The project’s graduation was conditioned on the demonstration of a “documented, structured governance process” and a passing grade in a cybersecurity audit conducted by an outside firm on CNCF’s behalf. 

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