5 Vitess Sharding Strategies for Live Traffic

Practical patterns to split MySQL at scale — without pausing writes, dropping queries, or waking the on-call.

Neurobyte

5 min read

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Oct 4, 2025

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Five Vitess sharding strategies for production: range vs hash, lookup vindexes, tenant pinning, vertical splits, and safe live resharding playbooks.

You don’t adopt Vitess because it’s trendy. You adopt it because one database stopped being enough, and you’d like to sleep again. The trick isn’t “learning Vitess” — it’s choosing sharding strategies that hold up under real traffic, skew, and product change. Here are five that consistently work.

1) Range Sharding on a Stable Primary Key

When it fits: IDs are monotonic (or mappable to uint64), access is mostly point lookups and time windows (orders, events), and you can tolerate hot ranges with a plan to split.

How it works (high-level): Vitess assigns each row a keyspace_id. With a range vindex, key ranges map to shards like -80, 80-, etc. Splitting is as simple as introducing a new range.

Setup (simplified):

-- vschema for range-based sharding
{
  "tables": {
    "orders": {
      "columnVindexes": [
        { "column": "order_id", "name": "hash" }  // or…