[0xcde4c3db]

It occurs to me that sharding shares most of these disadvantages. It avoids the problem of "you no longer read from your source of truth", but the overall complexity and set of failure modes looks strikingly similar.

I wonder how many sleepless nights have been caused by combining the two.

[rileymat1]

I have worked with a couple of systems that used very course grained sharding at the application level. I did not notice these drawbacks. I have not worked with one that did auto sharding on the back end, that might be trickier.