Making 768 servers look like 1

bddicken

Hey, I wrote this! Sharding is cool and foundational to making the internet work. I'm around to answer Qs.

elevation

Thanks for a well written article! When spec'ing a signle database host, I've been told to select the highest L1/L2 cache possible (allowing O(n^2) loads to complete with the least IO delay) with IOPs and RAM also being desirable. Does this hold when selecting hardware for shards? Do you ever see unusual ratios between egress bandwidth and shard count? For instance, do you ever see 128 shards under heavy load not managing to saturate a 1GbE link? Would love to see more of your writing on this topic.