From the project site (vitess.io):<p>> MySQL doesn't natively support sharding, but you will likely need it as your database grows.<p>Except, what tiny percentage of database backed applications in the world <i>actually</i> need sharding?<p>Just like the project that has 10 actual customers and uses dozens of managed resources in AWS/Google Cloud/Azure when a couple of load balanced/failover servers would work a lot more simply and a lot cheaper, this is going to reinforce the idea that a Database with 500Mb of production data needs to be sharded.<p>Honestly, I think it's entirely apt that Shard is just one letter away from Shart.