Appreciate the clarity on consistency trade-offs here. The CAP theorem callout is crucial because so many teams hit this wall once they start sharding and dont realize they've just opted into choosing between availability and strong consistency. I remember one project where we sharded user data by region thinking it would solve everything, but then global analytics queries became a nightmare - had to merge results from 8 shards client-side. The performance win on writes was real tho, just came with that hidden cost of cross-shard complexity you mentioned.
Appreciate the clarity on consistency trade-offs here. The CAP theorem callout is crucial because so many teams hit this wall once they start sharding and dont realize they've just opted into choosing between availability and strong consistency. I remember one project where we sharded user data by region thinking it would solve everything, but then global analytics queries became a nightmare - had to merge results from 8 shards client-side. The performance win on writes was real tho, just came with that hidden cost of cross-shard complexity you mentioned.