The Vitess Engineering Team is pleased to announce the release of version 22.0.0, along with version 2.15.0 of the Vitess Kubernetes Operator. This release benefits from a 6-month-long development cycle and introduces significant enhancements to query serving and cluster management, making Vitess more performant and easier to operate compared to version 21. The release highlights improvements in observability, prepared statements, sharded views, atomic distributed transactions, cluster management, and the Kubernetes Operator. The new release follows a consistent release cadence and is accompanied by enhanced examples, automated backups, and support for Kubernetes 1.32. Overall, Vitess 22.0.0 offers improved query latency, reduced memory allocations, and optimized performance through targeted optimizations in gRPC Codec upgrade, normalizer AST walk reduction, AST rewriting optimization, and merge-sort avoidance on single-shard queries.