Shard Level Migrations

Migrate large keyspaces without downtime

Description #

This feature is an experimental variant of the MoveTables command that allows you to migrate individual shards from one keyspace to another. Please be sure to understand the limitations and requirements below.

The full set of options for the MoveTables command can be found here. The options and other aspects specific to shard level migrations will be covered here.

Use Case #

The Mount and Migrate commands are the default method provided for moving keyspaces from one Vitess cluster to another. This method, however, only provides a one-time one-way cutover without the ability to revert in the way that MoveTables does.

This feature introduces the concept of partial keyspaces where some shards are served from a different keyspace during migration. This is useful for a specific but critical use-case where a large production Vitess setup (100s of shards) is being migrated to a new data center or provider. Migrating the entire cluster in one go using MoveTables could cause an unacceptable downtime due to the large number of primaries that need to be synced when writes are switched.

Supporting shard level migrations allows you to move very large keyspaces from one Vitess cluster to another in an incremental way, cutting over traffic and reverting as needed on a per-shard basis. When using this method, there is also a new vtgate --enable-partial-keyspace-migration flag that enables support for shard level query routing so that individual shards can be routed to one side of the migration or the other during the migration period — including when shard targeting is used.

Key Parameter #

--source-shards #

mandatory (for shard level migrations)

A list of one or more shards that you want to migrate from the source keyspace to the target keyspace.

Limitations and Requirements #

  • The source and target keyspaces must have the exact same shard definitions
  • Query routing is all or nothing per shard, so you must move all tables in the workflow that you wish to migrate and you would use SwitchTraffic --tablet-types=RDONLY,REPLICA,PRIMARY to switch read and write traffic all at once for the shard(s)
  • When the entire migration is complete, you cannot use the standard complete workflow action and the final cleanup step requires manual work:
    • The _reverse workflows should be canceled. This will clean up the both the global routing rules and the shard routing rules associated with the migration
    • You would need to perform any and all source side cleanup manually

In order to support the shard level query routing during the migration, the --enable-partial-keyspace-migration flag must be set for all of the vtgate instances in the target Vitess cluster.

This routing support has a performance impact for all traffic and thus you should only use this flag during the migration period and remove it once the migration is complete.

You can view the current shard level routing rules in place using the GetShardRoutingRules vtctldclient command and you can save updated routing rules using the ApplyShardRoutingRules command.

Shard Level Migrations