[justinclift]

Is there any way to have that automatically create n copies of the data across shards?

Something like a "min-copies 2" setting, which would ensure the shared data has at least one viable alternative in case of hardware failure (etc).

[mslot]

Historically, there has been, but we have found physical replication is ultimately a lot more performant, robust, and tweakable. Citus users & platforms generally use physical replication of each node for high availability.

For instance, the ability to quickly spin up a new replica using a disk snapshot is very useful and only feasible at the server level.

It is still possible to replicate shards (via the citus.shard_replication_factor setting), but it only helps for scaling read throughput, at the cost of lower write throughput.