Case Study: Square achieves near unlimited scale for Cash App with CNCF Vitess

How Vitess enables ‘near unlimited scale’ for Cash App

Square, a financial services company, faced a significant scaling challenge when its Cash App experienced rapid growth. The application's monolithic architecture, built on a single MySQL database, was not designed to support millions of users. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation's Vitess was identified as the solution to this long-term scalability problem.

The solution implemented by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation involved using Vitess for horizontal scaling of MySQL. This enabled shard splits with less than a second of downtime, making the process completely routine; the company performed ten shard splits in a single week. The impact was substantial, as only 5% of the system had to be changed to achieve near-unlimited scale, allowing feature teams to continue building new products without disruption.

Square

Jon Tirsen

Engineering Manager