Vitess offers a lot of quality of life improvements over stock MySQL, including built-in backups to S3/GCS, managed replication, plus soon to be auto-failover detection. Additionally, with vreplication, you can do some pretty powerful materialized views that aren't possible with MySQL. Finally, Vitess Messaging is an awesome way to do async work, allowing for transaction guarantees where you can ack a message, do data work, then add to another queue, all without having to deal with weird side effects.