When NOT to Shard
Read replicas, partitioning, and bigger boxes solve most scale problems — know when sharding is the wrong answer.
Sharding Is the Last Resort
Sharding multiplies operational complexity. Most apps never need it. Exhaust simpler options first.
Step 1: Vertical Scaling
Bigger box. Modern cloud instances easily handle:
- 128 cores
- 1 TB RAM
- 50,000 IOPS NVMe
That's 100k-500k QPS on a single Postgres node. Most apps fit comfortably.