The author, a software engineer with two decades of experience working with MySQL, has become frustrated with the lack of integration between open source tools in the MySQL ecosystem. Despite efforts to collaborate on projects, they found that deploying and automating third-party tools was often challenging due to differences in infrastructure, deployment mechanisms, and network setups. The author believes Vitess can address these issues by providing a full-blown infrastructure framework for MySQL, which would enable online schema migrations, high availability, consistency, disaster recovery, and more with minimal setup required. The author's vision is compatible with the PlanetScale team's plan to simplify Vitess installation, improve its ease of use, and bring in more infrastructure solutions, ultimately creating a "Grand Unified Theory" for database infrastructure that integrates existing tools and knowledge.