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Youtube also use MySQL.
by Thaxll 5y ago
Youtube also use MySQL.
- dheera 5y agoWow. Why don't they use in-house Google databases, which are supposedly vastly more scalable than MySQL?
- SQueeeeeL 5y agoProbably because a lot of those benefits don't actually translate that well towards their problem space. These aren't a bunch of 20 year olds throwing together a MongoDB, they're professionals using tools to actually make a product
- williamdclt 5y agoI don't think the people behind Spanner are a bunch of 20yo throwing together a MongoDB
- jacquesm 5y agoBecause there is a substantial cost to such migrations. If it works don't fix it.
- mastersummoner 5y agoWhile "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" is often a perfectly valid approach, there are going to be times when an upgrade can result in significant performance improvements or fewer admin headaches.
- linspace 5y agoDoes anything "just work"? Everything is constantly changing, new features always in demand, more users, more data.
- lazide 5y agoAnd you need to support that for anything you have ON TOP of any migration work - which is huge, and also a similarly moving target
- myohmy 5y agoIf IT is on the value chain this seems insane. If IT is ancillary to the value chain then this is standard.
- vp8989 5y agoYouTube built Vitess, which lets you scale out MySQL writers. If I can scale out both my writers and my readers then what could be "vastly more scalable" than that?
- WJW 5y agoAs far as I can tell, Vitess still has trouble with cross-server transactions and distributed locking. Presumably something "vastly more scalable" could work around this. The Spanner team noticeably put out https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/inside-cloud-spanner-and-the-cap-theorem https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/inside-clou... a few years back, which tl;drs that they managed to get a reliable enough network that partitions don't really happen anymore and so you can get both C _and_ A from the CAP theorem. I don't think that Vitess is quite at that level, especially since you can self-host it and thus the devs don't have such network-level uptime guarantees.
- vp8989 5y agoAre cross-server transactions scalable? Would anyone architect a system that did them en masse unless they absolutely 100% had to? I am just speculating here but I doubt that YouTube migrated to Spanner so that they could do cross-server transactions. I would think consolidating the Ops burden into the GCP org and also serving as a trophy "customer" were higher on the list of reasons. But again, just speculating...
- derekperkins 5y agoYeah, Google policy was to migrate everything to Spanner, not a technical decision. > Are cross-server transactions scalable? Would anyone architect a system that did them en masse unless they absolutely 100% had to? As a long time Vitess user and contributor/maintainer, this perfectly describes the issue. Minimal effort has been put into solving cross shard / 2PC transactions because a well designed system rarely needs it.
- ksec 5y agoI guess people from PlanetScale will know. Not sure if they are reading the thread.
- gresrun 5y agoYouTube used to use a MySQL-based system called Vitess[0]. It no longer uses it and has migrated to Spanner. [0]: https://vitess.io/ https://vitess.io/
- wikibob 5y agoAh this is interesting. Do you have any references on their migration to Spanner?
- buro9 5y agogresrun works at YouTube, if by reference you mean citation then his comment is it.
- jjnoakes 5y agowikibob was probably looking more for public documentation about the why and how rather than confirmation that the statement is true.
- owaislone 5y agoProbably because Youtube was using MySQL before being acquired and switched to a better, probably fully managed DB that was much easier (free?) to maintain and scale.
- wikibob 5y agoYep, I love watching conference talks or reading Twitter threads, papers, etc about these kind of migrations.
- Thaxll 5y agoThanks for the update! I found more details there: https://opensource.google/projects/vitess https://opensource.google/projects/vitess > How Google uses Vitess > Vitess was serving all YouTube database traffic from 2011 to 2019.
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- dekhn 5y agogoogle internally has always had a split mind about mysql. It never really jibed with the underlying google architecture but played an important role in multiple products (at least partly due to its replication features). Replacing it completely has turned out to be a huge challenge. I gained a fair amount of respect for mysql after seeing it applied at scale, but it was also a bit scary.