Sharding Is Hard: Let's Make It Easier!

You've stuck to a single database. It has gotten beefier and beefier servers as the scale grows. Now your RDS bill is $500k a month and half your indexes have stopped working! Database scaling is a common problem for applications reaching large scale. Vertical scaling works well to a point but gets expensive fast. In this talk we'll explore the other approach to scaling your database, horizontally with sharding — where do you start, which table do you shard on, and how do you keep your transactions atomic when they need to cross multiple shards?