[simonw]

I don't think it's possible for a framework like Django to support sharding out of the box - there are just too many different ways you might want to implement it. Digg shard by date for example, whereas a site like Flickr shards by user. It completely depends on your application. The database router stuff feels to me like the furthest a framework can go - though maybe a bunch of common routing patterns will emerge in the future.