layout	title	folder	permalink	categories	tags
pattern	Sharding	sharding	/patterns/sharding/	Behavioral	Performance Cloud distributed

Intent

Sharding pattern means divide the data store into horizontal partitions or shards. Each shard has the same schema, but holds its own distinct subset of the data. A shard is a data store in its own right (it can contain the data for many entities of different types), running on a server acting as a storage node.

Class diagram

Applicability

This pattern offers the following benefits:

• You can scale the system out by adding further shards running on additional storage nodes.
• A system can use off the shelf commodity hardware rather than specialized (and expensive) computers for each storage node.
• You can reduce contention and improved performance by balancing the workload across shards.
• In the cloud, shards can be located physically close to the users that will access the data.

Credits

• Sharding pattern