Increase IOPS and throughput with sharding

This post explains how sharding can improve database IOPS and throughput by distributing data and compute across multiple primary instances. It details the concepts of IOPS and throughput, their measurement in AWS EBS, and how they relate to database workloads. The core contribution is a cost comparison between sharded and unsharded database configurations (PlanetScale, RDS, Aurora) for both small and large compute/storage requirements, demonstrating that sharding offers a more linear and cost-effective scaling path for high-demand workloads.