What is the main goal of sharding in distributed systems?

The main goal of sharding in distributed systems is horizontal scaling and performance improvement by dividing data into parts (shards) that are stored and processed on different servers.

This allows:

• Reducing the load on a single server, as each shard only handles a portion of the data.
• Increasing query processing speed through parallel work with different shards.
• Ensuring system scalability as data volumes grow.

For example, in a database with billions of records, data can be split by users into several shards, so that requests to different users are processed by different servers, reducing response time and load.