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Vitess Cluster configuration¶
What it is¶
Cluster configuration (PlanetScale docs)
is a PlanetScale dashboard
surface that lets customers create and manage
keyspaces, custom
VSchema,
and routing rules
on their PlanetScale database without opening a
support ticket or invoking the
vtctldclient
CLI directly.
It is the topology-building substrate under PlanetScale Workflows: before a workflow can move data into a sharded keyspace, that sharded keyspace has to exist with a valid VSchema. Cluster configuration is where that keyspace is created.
Why it shows up on this wiki¶
Cluster configuration is a load-bearing prerequisite for the self-service sharding story PlanetScale launched with Workflows in 2024-11. Before Cluster configuration shipped, customers wanting to use sharded keyspaces had to engage PlanetScale's professional-services team; now the full sharding lifecycle is self-service:
- Cluster configuration — "create and configure sharded databases", build target topology.
- Workflows — move live data into the new topology and cut over traffic.
Canonical wiki split: cluster configuration = topology substrate, workflows = data-motion substrate. They cover the full sharding lifecycle together.
Architectural shape¶
From the worked example in the launch post: the Cluster configuration UI shows a list of keyspaces with a button to "create keyspaces as needed". The example shows two keyspaces in a single database:
gymtracker— unsharded source keyspace.gymtracker-sharded— sharded target keyspace.
Each keyspace is configured independently — number of shards, VSchema (which tables live in the keyspace, what the primary vindex is, what lookup vindexes exist), and routing rules (which table names route where).
The UI exposes three Vitess primitives that were previously operator-only:
- Keyspace creation with specified shard count.
- VSchema editing — which tables live in the keyspace, primary vindex choice, lookup-vindex declarations.
- Routing-rule editing — explicit per-table routing overrides.
(Source: sources/2026-04-21-planetscale-introducing-sharding-on-planetscale-with-workflows.)
Seen in¶
- sources/2026-04-21-planetscale-introducing-sharding-on-planetscale-with-workflows
— canonical wiki introduction. Ben Dicken's
2024-11-07 post names Cluster configuration as the
already-shipped substrate Workflows composes on top
of: "The recent release of the Cluster
configuration functionality allowed users to create
their own sharded keyspaces as well as configure
custom VSchema and routing rules. With the addition
of workflows, you can also easily migrate existing
data to sharded keyspaces and smoothly switch
production traffic between them with no downtime."
Worked example: two keyspaces (
gymtrackerunsharded +gymtracker-sharded) created via the UI before running a MoveTables workflow between them.