Sharding is a heated topic and many who have tried it have come away with a bad taste in their mouth. But it's also well proven that sharding your database is the true way to scale the data layer. From Instagram to Google to Salesforce, with large-enough data and with sufficiently demanding performance requirements, you need to shard in order to scale out. Using the lens of the Postgres open source database, I'll walk you through things to keep in mind to be successful with sharding, and which data model is the right approach for you. This is a sponsored talk by Citus Data.