Zone Sharding: Pinning Data to Regions
Learners will define zones on shard key ranges and assign them to shards, enabling data residency and geo-partitioning.
What Is Zone Sharding?
Zone sharding (formerly tag-aware sharding) lets you assign specific shard key ranges to designated groups of shards called zones. Documents whose shard key falls in a zone's range are stored only on the shards belonging to that zone. This enables geographic data residency, hardware-tier affinity, and workload isolation within a single sharded cluster.
Key Use Cases for Zone Sharding
Zone sharding solves several production problems: Data residency — EU GDPR requirements mandate that European user data stays in EU data centers. Tiered storage — keep hot recent data on NVMe shards and cold archive data on slower, cheaper shards. Tenant isolation — in a multi-tenant SaaS application, pin each enterprise customer's data to dedicated shards for noisy-neighbor prevention.
All lessons in this course
- Sharding Concepts: Chunks, Balancer, and Shard Keys
- Choosing a Shard Key: Cardinality, Frequency, Monotonicity
- Ranged vs Hashed Sharding Strategies
- Zone Sharding: Pinning Data to Regions