Vitess is an open-source database scaling system for MySQL that provides a solution to the problems of asynchronous failures and data loss in modern applications, such as collaboration tools like Slack, where users expect operations to be successful even in the face of system failures. By ensuring changes are saved locally on storage with the redo log and binary logs safely written to disk, and using semi-synchronous replication, Vitess prevents these failures and has been used by companies like YouTube, Slack, Square Cash, Pinterest, JD.com, and Hubspot without data loss incidents. The system's design allows for a trade-off between durability guarantees and performance, making it an attractive solution for building systems that do not lose data in the face of ordinary or catastrophic failures.