Challenges and Solutions in Sharding

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Sharding can be challenging due to one-off cases where a single customer or subset of customers is much larger than others, leading to difficulties in fitting into the standard sharding scheme. However, it is possible to address this issue by selectively choosing which shard specific items are on, such as the case of Justin Bieber having his own complete stack to run his Instagram account. This flexibility in sharding allows for isolating workloads and avoiding noisy neighbor issues that can impact the entire server, as seen with the example of a heavily starred repo like Bootstrap on GitHub.

Databases underpin almost every user experience on the web, but scaling a database is one of the most fundamental infrastructure challenges in software development. PlanetScale offers a MySQL platform that is managed and highly scaleable.

Sam Lambert is the CEO of PlanetScale and he joins the show to talk about why he started the platform, scaling databases, using Vitess for SQL shard orchestration, and more.

This episode is hosted by Lee Atchison. Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, and thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His best-selling book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments.

Lee is the host of his podcast, Modern Digital Business, an engaging and informative podcast produced for people looking to build and grow their digital business with the help of modern applications and processes developed for today’s fast-moving business environment. Listen at mdb.fm. Follow Lee at softwarearchitectureinsights.com, and see all his content at leeatchison.com.

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