This session reveals four experimental Vitess developments that automate away complex database operations. With these developments Vitess is able to run its own database infrastructure, transparently to the user, and take control of risky and elaborate situations and operations. We will briefly explain the Vitess architecture and how it supports said control, and discuss the following developments: - Throttling: pushback for massive writes. - Table life cycle: safe and lazy DROP TABLE operations. - Online DDL: automating, scheduling and managing online schema migrations. - HA, failovers and cluster healing via vitess/orchestrator (aka vtorc). Vitess is a CNCF open source database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL.